The First Performances

Bartholomew Fair is the most ‘occasional’ of Jonson’s plays, in the sense that it incorporates the unusual occasions of its first performances into the work itself and its meaning. In fact, only two performances are recorded from Jonson’s lifetime, but they were the first, and there are few stagings by the professional theatre of the period that remain so accessible to us. The play was first performed by the Lady Elizabeth’s Men at the Hope Theatre, Bankside, London, on 31 October 1614, and the next night it was repeated for the court in Whitehall, in the presence of King James. Both occasions are incorporated into the printed text: the Induction dates and places the first; the court performance is present in direct addresses to the King and in numerous glances at him and his concerns. This second performance is confirmed by the records of the royal Treasurer of the Chamber, which show that the performers were paid the standard fee of £10 on 11 June 1615 ‘for presenting a play called Bartholomew Fair before His Majesty on the first of November last past’ ( Malone Society Collections, 6.60).

Much that is known about these occasions makes them exceptional — not least that the court performance followed immediately upon the opening in a public theatre. No other new play is known to have transferred at once in this way (Blissett, 1974, 81-2). Plays were normally proved in public before being vetted by the Lord Chamberlain for performance at court — indeed, the players themselves would normally be cautious about risking an untried play before their most important audience. (Later, in the 1630s, a few plays by more amateur dramatists would be performed first at court before entering the professional repertory: see Edwards, 1981, 112.) It says much for Jonson’s stature at this time that an untried play was engaged for the King’s entertainment. Since ‘a good deal of time was spent in the discovery and preparation of suitable pieces’ (Chambers, ES, 1.223), Bartholomew Fair must have been chosen well in advance, presumably before rehearsals began (Sturgess, 1987, 170). Moreover, the Revels Office had elaborate scenery to build for the performance (as shown below). So Jonson would have had time in hand and a dual occasion in mind while finalising the text, a duality retained in the lengthy induction for the Hope and in the repeated evocation of the King within the text, an evocation that would be clinched by the unprecedented dedication of a commercial play to him (title page, 8n.), a dedication all the more emphasized by appearing on the title-page, unlike those in F1 (Marcus in Smith et al, 1995, 170). Although Jonson’s early career as a dramatist had been stormy, his standing at court now seems assured.

The special sense of occasion begins with the dates of these performances, since Bartholomew Fair was written not only about but also for a festivity. Where most traditional holy-days and holidays fell in the half-year between the winter and summer solstices of 24 December and 24 June, the play takes advantage of two major intervals of release during the more laborious half of the year: St Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August, and Hallowtide. Halloween, 31 October, was traditionally the most weird and uncanny night of the year, and from the most ancient times it had been the night when the dead were supposed to return to their old haunts and companions, while witches and other dark powers were at their zenith. Despite such macabre associations, the festival had long been celebrated with merriment and feasting. In Jonson’s society, it was largely a time of pranks and practical jokes (known as Mischief Night in some parts of the country), with the stores of summer opened for feasting, with cheerful and noisy games, and with simple rites of divination played with facetious semi-belief. A play that the Scrivener presents as ‘merry and as full of noise as sport’ (Ind., 61-2) is in keeping with this.

Various ancient festivals associated with the waning power of the sun coincided on 1 November — notably the Celtic Samhain commemorating the end of summer and the death of the saviour god — and these became absorbed into the Christian celebrations of the saints and faithful in heaven on All Saints’ Day and the following All Souls’ Day, 2 November. In keeping with this, the winter season at court began on All Saints’ Day — it was the day when Lords of Misrule took up the office they would hold until Candlemas Day, 2 February — and King James had restored the old custom of marking the onset of this season with a major court celebration at Whitehall. Plays were often performed then, but it remains altogether exceptional to have marked such an important festive occasion with an untried commercial play.

The sense that this is a play for a special occasion is borne out by both the length of the text and the size of the cast. The induction’s statement that the audience is to pay patient attention ‘for the space of two hours and an half and somewhat more’ (59-60) indicates not an exact duration but that the play is going to be long. Public theatre performances began at 2 pm and were limited by the stamina of the groundlings and the early onset of darkness in winter. It is estimated that, in unbroken speech, contemporary actors averaged some 160-70 words or about twenty lines of verse a minute. With the average length of a play of the period about 2,250 lines, it follows that plays were normally performed ‘richly in two short hours’ (H8, Prol., 13), although the complete entertainment would usually be filled out to approaching three hours by music, intervals, or a final jig. When the citizens of Blackfriars raised a petition against the theatre in 1619 they grumbled that their streets were blocked by people and coaches ‘from one or two of the clock till six at night’ (Malone Society Collections, 1.1.92), and much of the last hour must have gone on the traffic jam of departing pedestrians, coaches, and hackneys. However, many plays by Shakespeare and all those by Jonson up to 1616 — though very few by the less esteemed playwrights — have texts well over 3,000 lines long, and so must have been cut for performance. This practice is explicit in, for example, the authors’ prefaces to Every Man Out of His Humour and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and the publisher’s preface to the 1647 folio collection of Beaumont and Fletcher (Rasmussen, 1997, 442). The full text of Bartholomew Fair is an extreme case, and it is almost twice as long as the average play of the period. It is significantly longer than any Shakespeare play, including the second Hamlet Quarto, and well beyond even Jonson’s average. Assuming delivery at 165 words a minute, a full run-through even at that brisk contemporary speed would take very little less than four hours in the Hope Theatre text, and a few minutes less in the court version. And that is allowing nothing for laughter, for significant pauses, for the slower pace of the musical settings, and especially for the intervals built into its structure, which were then customary in the professional theatre and essential at court, where the candles required regular trimming (see 2.1.0 Longer Notes). As I argue in the Textual Introduction, printer’s copy for F2 was Jonson’s ‘foul papers’ or an uncritical copy of them; it is not a text revised, cleaned up, and slimmed down for the theatre. Like Shakespeare’s major work, Jonson’s plays, being too long for the stage, claim a literary as well as theatrical existence. It follows from the induction that Jonson was anticipating substantial cuts in the performed text, but at the same time, the induction’s adding of about one-third to the standard performance length indicates that he sees his play as meriting as much time as could be expected when, on 31 October, the sun sets before 5.00 pm, while the court performance would not begin until as late as about 10.00 pm. (See Hart, 1932b, Gurr, 1996b, Erne, 2003.)

As for the ‘Persons’, with its thirty-six named characters Bartholomew Fair requires an exceptionally, although not uniquely, large cast for its time, even after allowing for doubling. There are twenty speaking characters on stage together in the last scene, presumably plus puppeteers (at least two of whom have just been in action) and some supernumeraries. When George Devine was preparing his 1950 production for the Old Vic at Edinburgh, he sketched stage positions for thirty-eight actors in this scene (Teague, 1985, 120). Of the speakers here, eighteen are major characters on stage in at least several scenes — all the major characters, in fact, except Trash and Mooncalf, who do not appear after Act 3. Since Troubleall does not appear until Act 4, it is likely that he was doubled with one of this pair, probably Mooncalf. At least nineteen actors are therefore required for the significant speaking parts. Some of these can double small parts who appear in only one or two scenes, but they cannot double the three named Watchmen, who have repeated appearances though they speak little; — Poacher, for example, has only one speech but coincides on stage with all the major characters. So a minimum of twenty-two actors is required for the speaking roles. In addition, so many boys, passers-by, porters, puppeteers, and unnamed watchmen are needed as mutes that it would be difficult for actors in substantial roles to double all of them, and the total cast in 1614 probably approached thirty, whereas Shakespeare normally wrote for a cast of twelve men and four boys. Jonson may well have been responding here to the merger in 1613 of Lady Elizabeth’s and the Children of the Queen’s Revels (also known as the Children of the Chapel and the Blackfriars Boys), and this suggests why there are so many parts suitable for boys. Seven boys are named alongside seven men in the patent for the company, dated 31 May 1613, that was produced when they visited Coventry early in 1615 (Ingram, 1981, 394). In Bartholomew Fair, boys are likely to have played the seven named female parts (though Ursula, who has at times been acted by a man since at least the early eighteenth century, may well have been played by an adult), plus Cokes the gangling youth, Mooncalf the ‘pretty stripling’ (2.2.111), Wasp the ‘little old fellow’ (1.3.88), and the boys playing around in the fair (4.2.8, 5.3.0). Jonson is clearly writing with this company in mind, because his text is more prescriptive about the physical appearance of the characters than any other play of the period, as well as their dress and the props they handle (Sturgess, 1987, 178ff.).

It is striking that Jonson should have tailored this major play to a new troupe, especially as all his plays since 1603 except Epicene had been written for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. It is likely that he was happy to collaborate with its leading actor, Nathan Field, a protégé of his who is praised at 5.3.67 and who had acted in his plays for boys’ companies, Cynthia’s Revels, Poetaster, and Epicene. Bartholomew Fair was to prove the high point of the company’s existence, even though the previous year it had introduced Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Under James I, patronage of the London companies was confined to members of the royal family, so that approval for naming the company after Elizabeth (1596-1662) — the King’s daughter, who married the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, in 1613 and through him was to become Queen of Bohemia in 1619 — must have come from the court. She was made its patron by royal warrant on 27 April 1611. Despite this royal sanction, the company’s history was to prove insecure, partly because at first there were not enough theatres in London to accommodate the six companies then officially tolerated, and partly because its most creative years, 1613-16, coincided with a chaotic period when (according to the aggrieved actors) its manager — the entrepreneur Philip Henslowe, who was manoeuvring himself into unprecedented power over the actors — broke, dismembered, and re-formed five companies in order to further his profits and his power. It was Henslowe who in 1613 had merged the company with the Queen’s Revels. The new company had recently become established at its own theatre, the Hope, but it was never to be out of difficulties. In February 1615 there was a breach between Henslowe and the company, and the actors drew up a list of grievances alleging fraud and other misconduct by their manager over the previous three years. They claimed he had kept them in debt in order to keep them in his power. After this, from the spring of 1615 at least until Henslowe’s death in January 1616, they joined forces with Prince Charles’s Men, though for collaboration rather than amalgamation. Eight leading players, including the stars Nathan Field, Joseph Taylor, and Robert Benfield, left the company at this period. From 1616 to 1622 a Lady Elizabeth’s company was mainly or entirely a provincial troupe, though a company of that name flourished in the capital from 1622 until almost all companies were reorganised in 1625-6, when severe plague coincided with the succession of Charles I. (See Chambers, ES, 2.466-7; Bentley, JCS, 1.176-97; and Beckerman, 1971.)

Bartholomew Fair is the only play known to have been performed at the company’s Hope Theatre, the newest playhouse in London. Because of this, and because of the eminence of the playwright and the unusual demands of the play, it has often been assumed that it was written as a festive opening for the theatre (e.g. M. C. Bradbrook, 1976, 97). It is clear, however, that plays were already being performed there, because a few weeks earlier, on 7 October, John Taylor the ‘water poet’ and William Fennor, a hack writer and pamphleteer, had agreed to an improvised trial of wit on the stage of the Hope. Fennor defaulted, and Taylor, failing to entertain the angry audience alone, had to be rescued by Lady Elizabeth’s Men, who placated the audience by putting on a performance (5.3.61-2n.).

The Hope, which straddled the modern Bear Gardens in Southwark, a short distance to the northwest of Shakespeare’s Globe, was both conservative and innovative as an undertaking. It was the last ‘public’ theatre — a wooden amphitheatre open to the skies — to be built at that period, when the indoor ‘private’ theatres had become more fashionable (even though at the same time the Globe was being magnificently rebuilt after a disastrous fire on 29 June 1613, and the Fortune was to be re-built in 1621 after another fire). The Hope was innovative, however, in being designed specifically for both plays and bear-baiting (although older structures such as Paris Garden had been adapted for both entertainments.) (The older view that theatres developed out of baiting rings is rejected by Brownstein, 1979, and Orrell, 1988, 14-20.)

More is known about the Hope as a building than any other London theatre of the day, because the contract for its construction survives. On 29 August 1613, Henslowe and Jacob Meade, the leading impresario of bull- and bear-baiting, commissioned Gilbert Katherens, a carpenter, to pull down the old Beargarden and ancillary buildings and erect the Hope and new ancillary buildings on an overlapping site. Although the new theatre was due to be ready by the end of November, work was still underway as late as spring, 1614 — it is not known why it took so long (Chambers, ES, 2.370). Katherens was, says the contract, to build ‘one other game place or playhouse fit and convenient in all things, both for players to play in, and for the game of bears and bulls to be baited in the same, and also a fit and convenient tire-house and a stage to be carried or taken away, and to stand upon trestles good, substantial, and sufficient for the carrying and bearing of such a stage’. Inventive carpentry was demanded of Katherens: the closing phrases just cited are ambiguous, but it seems likely that not only the stage but also the tiring-house (which in the public theatres usually stood within the outer ‘wooden O’: see Orrell, 1988, 67-9) had to be readily dismantled. Moreover, he was ‘to build the heavens [protective canopy] all over the said stage, to be borne and carried without any posts or supporters to be fixed or set upon the said stage, and all gutters of lead needful for the carriage of all such rainwater as shall fall upon the same’ (Chambers, 2.466-7, as corrected by Wickham, 1959-2002, 2.72). He must have cantilevered the canopy from the outer frame of the building.

In other respects the Hope was to be based upon the existing Swan Theatre — ‘to be made in all things and in such form and fashion as the said playhouse called the Swan’ — with a brick foundation for the wooden structure, seating on three storeys and two external staircases to the upper levels, ‘two boxes in the lowermost storey fit and decent for gentlemen to sit in’, ‘turned columns upon and over the stage’, ‘good and sufficient oaken timber’ and no mere fir for the major and visible woodwork, and (no doubt in view of the fire at the Globe) an expensive roof of new English tiles rather than cheaper and lighter thatch. The carpenter was to be paid £360, which seems small besides the £1,400 supposedly being spent at the same time on the second Globe, but that sum has been thought implausibly high, while Katherens’s costs were kept low by using timber from the old Beargarden or supplied free by Henslowe.

The general appearance of the auditorium can be inferred from the famous sketch of the interior of the Swan made about 1596 by Johannes de Witt, copied by his friend Aernout van Buchel (Foakes, 1985, 52). This shows a rectangular trestle-stage thrusting into the circular arena for the groundlings, with two large double-hung doors as stage entrances from the façade of the tiring-house, and with a gallery above for the more select spectators or for music and upper-stage action, the whole being surmounted by a hut-like structure. (No ‘discovery space’ is shown, nor an arras which might be concealing one, and although such a space is required at the opening of Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside — the only play known to have been designed for performance at this theatre — the door-openings appear large enough for one to have served in this way. Indeed, the headnote to Chaste Maid, 5.4, ‘Enter at one door . . . At the other door . . .’, confirms the accuracy of de Witt’s sketch.) It is probable, then, that the Hope also had only two stage doors, and, despite its complexity, Bartholomew Fair can indeed be played with only two doors; it makes much less play with entrances than Jonson’s three previous comedies. (Waith, ed. Bart. Fair, 207, is incorrect in claiming that 4.6 requires three stage entrances.) Contrary to the Swan sketch, however, there was obviously an arras on the tiring-house wall of the Hope (Ind., 7n.).

In the sketch, the stage and tiring house stand at one side of a ‘wooden O’ — or else a polygon of twenty-four or so many sides as to appear circular — an outer circle on three levels for the seated spectators. (For a detailed account, see Hosley, 1975.) The Hope, lacking any pillars to support the heavens, would have presented an uncluttered stage, while the heavens, being ‘all over the said stage’, would have been higher and much larger than they appear in the sketch.

This suggests also why the hut or gabled structure found above the heavens and tiring-house in the sketch of the Swan and other contemporary representations of other theatres is absent from those of the Hope. The outer appearance of the theatre is known from various sketches and engravings, most familiarly in Wenceslaus Hollar’s ‘Long View’ of London from Southwark (1647) (Foakes, 1985, 36), where it is identified as the ‘bear baiting h[ouse]’ (though the name is exchanged in error with that of the nearby Globe). An external staircase is visible in almost identical positions on both these neighbouring playhouses, but the nearest equivalent to the twin-gabled structure that dominates the inner circle of the Globe is a large peak at the matching southwest side of the Hope’s outer circle. The placing of these structures suggests that in both theatres the tiring-house stood to the southwest of the inner building, protecting actors and the highest-paying spectators from the evening sun and the stage from rain brought by the prevailing wind. It has been reliably calculated that the Hope was almost exactly 100 feet in diameter and 32 feet high, while the stage offered a very large acting area, some 43 feet wide and 27 feet 6 inches in depth (Orrell, 1983, 101-5, and 1988, 63-4).

In the event, however, the Henslowe/Meade initiative at the Hope was a limited success. Tensions created by the dual purpose of the building are already evident in Jonson’s Induction, with its scornful references to the bears and the stink they created. A conflict of interest was soon apparent, and no acting company would stay long at the theatre. As mentioned above, early in 1615 the actors of Lady Elizabeth’s Men drew up a list of complaints against Henslowe, whose attempts to assume an innovative role as manager of the company rather than continue as financial backer and theatre-landlord appeared high-handed (Beckerman, 1971). Their ‘Articles of Grievance and Oppression’, a compendium of all they could find to say against him, accuse him of financial mismanagement and autocratic dealings, such as rewarding the company inadequately for the days given over to baiting. It was this crisis that apparently brought an end to Lady Elizabeth’s as a London company. Until its destruction in 1656, the Hope was indeed the ‘bear baiting house’ and was used far more for bear-baiting and similar exhibitions than for plays.

For the second performance of Bartholomew Fair, the company was at a place no longer ‘as dirty as Smithfield, and as stinking every whit’ (Ind., 119-20), although it is not explicit just where the court performance was held. There were several sites for royal theatrical entertainments at this time, four of them in Whitehall Palace alone: the Great Chamber, the Great Hall, the Cockpit, and the Banqueting House. It is very likely that the play was performed in the last of these, the largest and grandest, even though this is contrary to what is implied in the Declared Accounts of the Office of Works for the period from 1 October 1614 until 30 September 1615, where there is the entry: ‘Diverse works and reparations in making ready the Great Chamber for plays, the Banqueting House for a masque, and the Hall for revels and shows’ ( Malone Society Collections, 10.26, see Sturgess, 1987, 174). This is contradicted by a more specific entry under the 1614-15 season in ‘Chamber Accounts: Apparellings’ (which record the preparation of royal dwellings for use by the sovereign or royal consort), where one John Heborne and the maximum number of ten assistants were paid for eight days’ work in September-November 1614 for making ready the Banqueting House ‘for plays’, and it is most unlikely that Bartholomew Fair was not one of these (Malone Society Collections, 6.111), since the only other rooms recorded as being prepared that autumn were at the Queen’s court, Somerset House. Work there did not begin until November, while preparations for Bartholomew Fair must have been made in October.

The Banqueting House was a fitting place for a play that would be dedicated to the King, since it was a sumptuous hall built at his initiative, and he took pride in it. An elaborate banqueting house of wood and canvas built for Queen Elizabeth in 1581 had survived for twenty-five years, but James disliked it, and in 1607, according to Stow, ‘the King pulled down the old, rotten, slight-builded Banqueting House at Whitehall, and new builded the same this year very strong and stately, being every way larger than the first’ (Annals, 1631, cited Bentley, JCS, 6.255). After the opening, James boasted to the Venetian ambassador that his predecessors had left him a building of wood ‘which he had converted into stone’ ( CSPV, 1607-10 , 86), though in fact it was largely built of brick. It was a substantial rectangular room, 120’ by 53’, on the site of the present Banqueting House in Whitehall; there was space for a large stage and audience. In the course of his detailed report on the performance of Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue on 6 January 1618, Orazio Busino, Almoner to the Venetian Embassy, was impressed by how many the hall could accommodate: 'For although they profess only to admit the favoured ones who are invited, yet every box was filled notably with most noble and richly arrayed ladies, in number some 600 and more according to the general estimate.' The ground plan of the hall is recorded by the architect John Smythson in a sketch of c. 1618 (reproduced Orgel & Strong, 1.81), although there were ten pillars along each of the east and west sides rather than the nine in the sketch ( Malone Society Collections, 10.xvi-xix). These pillars, and two more across the north end, supported galleries on those three sides, and, though made of wood on plinths and bases of stone, were painted to resemble marble. Less ornate pillars went from the galleries to the intricate plaster ceiling. Overall there was a great deal of carving and gilding to aid the display of royal magnificence, for this was the King’s audience-chamber and place of state and judgment. Forty-six double-casement windows ensured that daytime audiences were well illuminated. Busino gives this account of it:

Whilst waiting for the King we amused ourselves by admiring the decorations and beauty of the house with its two orders of columns, one above the other, their distance from the wall equalling the breadth of the passage, that of the second row being upheld by Doric pillars, while above these rise Ionic columns supporting the roof. The whole [of the interior] is of wood, including even the shafts, which are carved and gilt with much skill. From the roof of these hang festoons and angels in relief with two rows of lights.

(Bentley, JCS, 6.257)

The first entertainment in the new hall seems to have been Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty on 10 January 1608, and some ten of Jonson’s masques were to be performed there. From 1610, plays were also performed there. The hall was, however, burned down on 12 January 1619, and was replaced by Inigo Jones’s masterpiece, the surviving Banqueting House.

Turning now to the performances themselves, Jonson is unusually specific and detailed in his requirements. As mentioned above, he wrote the play with a particular troupe in mind: the actors of Cokes, Wasp, Ursula, and Mooncalf require distinctive physiques, with Wasp and Cokes anticipating other ‘odd couples’ such as Laurel and Hardy. Clothing is specified with precision: Mistress Overdo’s French hood and Mistress Purecraft’s strait stomacher, Leatherhead’s velvet jerkins, Win’s fashionable hat and shoes, etc. Throughout, clothes are social signifiers. Moreover, Jonson sought to create a dense social milieu and a recognizable image of the Fair. Bartholomew Fair ‘probably requires more props than any other contemporary play’ (Sturgess, 1987, 180), not only items significant in the plot such as the black box and assorted papers, but also all the paraphernalia of the Fair: Leatherhead’s trinkets, Trash’s gingerbread men, Ursula’s pig pan, firebrand, tobacco, and bottles of ale, Nightingale’s ballads, the Costermonger’s pears, Cokes’s purchases, and all the rest. In addition, besides various props of moderate size, such as Trash’s basket, there are four substantial items: (1) Lantern Leatherhead’s stand; (2) Ursula’s booth, with its chairs and benches; (3) the stocks; (4) Leatherhead’s puppet-theatre. Accordingly, the 1614-15 accounts of Master of the Revels (who was responsible for scenery, costumes, and stage hangings at court plays) include the entry: ‘Canvas for the booths and other necessaries for a play called Bartholomew Fair, forty-one shillings sixpence’ (Streitberger, 1986, 70).

The structure of the Banqueting House means that these properties must there have been free-standing, and it will have been the same at the Hope, since the text refers to actors being at the ‘backside’ of Ursula’s booth before walking round to the front (4.3.104). Leatherhead’s stand is never called a booth but consistently referred to as a shop (e.g. 2.2.4; 3.4.65, 112-5; 3.6.65), a term used only once elsewhere (of Joan Trash’s basket, 3.4.77 SD). This implies he has something less than a full-scale booth: he appears to have a stall for display rather than a booth that could be entered. It must have been substantial compared to Trash’s basket, since he charges Cokes six times as much as she does for his wares and his rent, 30s as opposed to 5s (3.4.117-21). On the other hand, it must have been transportable, like her basket, because Cokes wants to buy ‘thy whole shop, case and all’ (3.4.115-16), and Leatherhead is able to ‘pack up all, and be gone’ (3.6.16) in a trice at the end of the act. It is likely he was a ‘barrow-boy’ with a small cart as a stall, and simply trundled it away (as in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1969). Alternatively, he may have been given the comic display of packing his goods away into the ‘case’ with deft skill.

Ursula’s booth must have been much more substantial, since groups of characters go into it or emerge from it; at 4.4 as many as seven revellers are discovered within and are joined by two others. The booth must also have had two sections, with guests welcomed at the front and cooking and other services supposedly active within. The rear section would also have been an apt place to hide the stolen cloaks in 4.4. There is no reason to doubt that it was fundamentally the standard kind of booth as summarized by Gabriel Egan:

The essential features of a stage booth are a three-dimensional rectilinear wooden frame large enough for several players to stand in, with curtains suspended from the top which can be drawn aside to reveal or closed to conceal the occupants, and perhaps a solid roof strong enough to support a player or two.

(Egan, 1998, 44)

Such properties, with canvas stretched over a skeleton of wooden poles and lath, were simply drawn or carried on and off stage by stage-keepers or attendant players at need, within full view of the audience. The brief intervals observed between acts even by the adult companies by 1614 would have made it easy for such large items to be moved without interrupting the action at all. Unlike Cleopatra’s ‘monument’ or presumably Scoto’s ‘bank’ in Volpone, 2.2.2, Ursula’s booth did not require the strength to support actors clambering on it, and indeed it is clear from 3.2.45-6 that it was at least in part covered with boughs. On the other hand, it may well have been a good deal larger than usual. It has been reckoned that an average of sixteen square yards of canvas was used for the ‘houses’ brought on stage in court performances of the later sixteenth century (Nagler, 1981, 41). Assuming a height of six feet, so much canvas would at most be enough for a square structure with sides six feet long, or eight feet if the front was open, or curtained with another material. Bearing in mind that Ursula’s booth is in two sections, this would hardly be large enough for the crowded beginning of the ‘vapours’ scene, even though the action was no doubt quick to spill onto the main stage. It is probable, therefore, that this was a booth of large size. Since coarse canvas cost about a shilling a yard (Linthicum, 96-7), this is compatible with the 41s 6d spent on ‘canvas for the booths and other necessaries’. In any event, the front of the booth must have had curtains that could be used to hide or reveal those within (as in Egan’s summary).

The third large property, the stocks, must also have been somewhat larger than standard. They were usually light enough to be carried on and off when required, as indicated by the direction Stocks brought out in King Lear, 2.2. In Bartholomew Fair, 4.6, they have to restrain not a single prisoner as in Lear but Wasp, Busy, and Justice Overdo all at once. This could have made for a very substantial property, but it appears to have been kept less bulky by having only three holes, with only one leg of each prisoner locked in place. At 4.1.27 and 4.6.37 and 65 the prisoners are each commanded to put just one leg in, and Wasp’s deft manner of escape exploits this.

Fourthly, Lantern’s puppet-show seems to have used glove-puppets (5.3.55 SDn.), and so will have required a simple kiosk-theatre of what became the Punch-and-Judy type. This presumably stood, however, within a large booth: a defined structure around the theatre itself is required by the display of a banner attracting patrons within, by the demands of the doormen for entrance money, and by the way some prospective clients hover outside. (Admittedly, this structure could simply have been indicated by ropes, posts, or barriers about a free-standing kiosk, as Eugene Waith suggests (ed. Bart Fair, 216) and as in some modern productions, but the established tradition of stage-booths and the realism of the mise-en-scène make this less likely.) Since the scenes of the puppet-play have as many as fourteen speaking characters on stage, plus the unseen puppeteers and no doubt some supernumerary boys and bystanders, with over twenty named characters on stage for the last scene, the booth must again have been large, even though there was no doubt a rapid overspill onto the main stage as the action continued. It must have been possible not only to open the front, as with Ursula’s booth, but also at least part of the sides of the structure: the audience needs to be able to follow the detail of the puppet-play within the booth and also to follow the reactions of the onlookers, in whom, after all, it is more interested.

The question arises how these four major properties might have been deployed on the stage at the Hope and the Banqueting House. The most detailed studies assume a static staging. Waith sums up his minute analysis: ‘Only in the change from Littlewit’s house [which occupied the whole stage] to the Fair is the entire stage used to represent first one locality, then another. Thereafter all localities are simultaneously present and the action moves from one to another’ (217). R.B. Parker goes further, proposing an elaborate, emblematic layout, with Ursula’s booth symbolising hell in the traditional ‘sinister’ position, stage left, the puppet-theatre standing in as a comic heaven in the traditional position of stage right, and with the stocks downstage centre ‘as an emblem of the trials that this world imposes on the virtuous’ (1970, 295). Since the puppet-theatre is not required until Act 5, it does duty as the Littlewits’ house in Act 1, and has the stands of Leatherhead and Trash in front of it during Acts 2 and 3. This schema is unpersuasive: the domestic action of Act 1 seems to be taking place in the Fair, with the action confined by it to one part of the stage; one large booth, dominating up to half the stage, is then left unused for three acts, with its alleged (and inexplicit) symbolic function unrevealed; the stocks are required only in Act 4, and for most of the play would simply be a dead space and a distraction, and, if placed downstage as Parker suggests, would hamper the sight lines of the central groundlings.

While both Waith and Parker assume a static stage, it is clear that even large props could be moved and assembled speedily. In Volpone, for example, the bed is moved on and off several times, while Scoto’s ‘bank’ is assembled within twenty-five lines of dialogue or about a minute and a quarter. In any case, the precise structure of Bartholomew Fair act by act means that major changes of set always coincide with an interval, and it is clear that a versatile staging would have posed no problems. Moreover, for all the complexities of the play’s action and detailed mise-en-scène, it is carefully devised to work with a simple and flexible use of the larger props. Act 1 requires none of them at all, and Act 5 requires only the puppet-theatre within its booth (scene 2 takes place outside, but just by, that theatre, 5.2.109-10). Waith (209) argues that Ursula’s booth should remain visible on stage because at 5.6.12-13 John says of Win: ‘I left her at the great woman’s house in trust yonder, the pig-woman’s’, a reading of ‘yonder’ which is surely too literal when taken to mean he is pointing at the booth itself. Indeed, if all John has to do when searching for Win at Ursula’s is to cross the stage, so remaining in sight, it becomes implausible that the search takes him two long scenes, since he sets off to find her early in 5.4.

Since the only large property required for Act 5 is the puppet-theatre, and since sight lines are important if the audience is to follow both the puppet-play and the reactions of the crowded stage-audience, it would make sense for the booth to be located upstage centre, with the side-curtains open, and with the members of the stage-audience fanning out and spreading beyond the confines of the booth once entrance money has been paid and the performance gets under way. There are likely to have been only a few chairs on stage for them to fix their positions (5.4.25 SDn.).

In Acts 2 and 3, a more complex layout is required, since there are three principal settings: Ursula’s booth (which is the focus of half the scenes), the ground occupied by Leatherhead and Trash — it is clear from the opening of 2.2 that these are close together — and unlocalized scenes. Apart from the Justice’s soliloquies in 2.1 and 3.3 (which would presumably be spoken at the very front of the stage, with the life of the Fair stirring behind him), there are only two unlocalized scenes: Overdo’s speech as ‘Mad Arthur’ and Nightingale’s ‘Caveat for Cutpurses’ (2.6 and 3.5), in each of which Cokes loses a purse. Each of these requires a crowded stage and is the climax of its act, and it makes most sense for them to hold the centre stage. It follows that in these acts the action flows between three stage-areas, presumably with Ursula’s booth and Leatherhead’s shop standing somewhat upstage and to opposite sides — casual chatter does not require them to be close together — with the central downstage area free for the climactic scenes. Waith envisages Ursula’s booth as central (212), but such a large booth in this position would cramp the staging of the climaxes.

Act 4 works on similar lines, but with the stocks on stage throughout instead of Leatherhead’s shop. It would make sense, therefore, for the stocks to stand where the shop did, again leaving the centre-stage free for the two unlocalized scenes (although this time the scene of theft from Cokes, 4.2, is less noisy and climactic than the game of ‘vapours’ in and around Ursula’s booth, 4.4).

This simple and almost symmetrical scheme requires sizeable properties to be moved on or off stage at the end of acts 1, 3, and 4, but, as argued above, this is no problem, since the set is unchanged within each act and intervals marked the transitions between acts (2.1.0n.). In passing, it may be noted that the ease of fitting such changes into the play makes even more unnecessary Herford and Simpson’s unsupported suggestion that the first act was played ‘above’ on the upper stage (10.170).

Any disturbance caused by moving properties would have been lessened if, as suggested above, Leatherhead’s shop could simply be wheeled off stage and if, as is very probable, what had for three acts been Ursula’s booth became the puppet-theatre (a suggestion made in passing by Armstrong, 1960, 54). All that then would be required at the end of Act 4 would be moving a structure of canvas and light timber from one side of the stage to the centre and setting the puppet-theatre itself in the front compartment. Egan argues that this economy of means is unlikely, since the Revels accounts refer to ‘booths’ in the plural (1998, 46). But on his own evidence ‘booth’ was the technical term for large properties of all kinds, from rocks to the mouth of hell — he even argues that it is ironically unorthodox for a stage booth to be representing a real booth (44) — and it follows that Leatherhead’s shop, whatever form it took, could be classified as a booth. Moreover, the change of function for the large booth is made explicit by the stress on the puppet-theatre’s sign at the very beginning of Act 5, contrasting with the emphasis on Ursula’s sign in 3.2. Presumably the change was also marked by removing the boughs that had been covering part of the booth, so opening up the sight lines.

It follows from this discussion that whatever elaborations may have been worked around the written text in the early performances — and the listing of boys and other supernumerary characters in the Persons and the silent presence on stage of Leatherhead from 2.2.25 to 2.4.3 imply that the dialogue was spoken against some background activities suggesting the wider Fair — the essentials required to stage the exceptionally complex action of the play work with very economical means. Although the play made unusual demands in that it was rare for more than two large properties to be needed in a single play, there are, as Parker points out (1970, 307), analogous three-booth sets in Middleton and Dekker, The Roaring Girl, 2.1 (c. 1608) and Heywood (?), The Fair Maid of the Exchange (c. 1602). Other advantages apart, this basic simplicity must have aided the actors in their instant transfer of a still unfamiliar play from the Hope to Whitehall. The cast would need to be instantly at home on a second stage, where the large properties were not from their own theatre but supplied by the Revels Office. The virtue of a basic simplicity was borne out by the seminal modern production of the play, by George Devine for the Old Vic Company in 1950-51. This opened at the Edinburgh Festival in the Assembly Rooms, with a vast set recreating a fair in immense detail strung across the width of the large hall. As mentioned below, when the production moved to London four months later, reviewers were unanimous in preferring the version as slimmed down for the Old Vic Theatre.

1614-1642

There is no direct evidence for the success of Bartholomew Fair with its original audiences. Although it is supposed to have been so popular that it established the catchphrase ‘O rare Ben Jonson’, which was to be carved on his tombstone, the evidence is late. The antiquary William Oldys (who was not born until 1696) noted in a copy of Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatic Poets (1691) ‘what old Mr Clud told me of the inscription on his [Jonson’s] tombstone arising from the popular applause of this play [Bartholomew Fair] after his solemn Catiline had been coldly received by the audience’ (H&S, 1.183). Nevertheless, the prevailing assumption has been that so rich a play must have been successful.

Paradoxically, it is often suggested that this successful play was performed only twice in Jonson’s lifetime, because no performances other than those recalled in the text itself are on record (e.g. Sturgess, 1987, 170; Kay, 1995, 149). But by this token there were only three contemporary performances of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, one of Much Ado about Nothing, and none at all of As You Like It — all undoubtedly popular plays. It is true that Bartholomew Fair demanded a large cast and a lot of props and was closely associated with the court, but why go to the trouble of setting up such an elaborate play only to drop it, especially as the courtly associations would add to the play’s prestige? The court, after all, paid only the standard fee of £10, hardly enough to justify the effort and expense.

As it happens, there are hints that the play was less than a universal success. The contempt for the audience expressed in the Horatian epigraph on the title page suggests as much. Also, Drummond records: ‘To me he read the preface of his Art of Poesy, upon Horace’s Art of Poesy, where he hath an apology of a play of his, St Bartholomew’s Fair’ (Informations, 58-9). While this means an apology in the sense of a vindication, it appears that Jonson felt the play needed some defence. Perhaps it was vulnerable because the extreme complexity of the plotting and the lack of clear moral teaching made it seem to fall short of Horatian ideals of narrative and moral coherence in the Ars Poetica. Herford and Simpson suggest that the play ‘cannot have satisfied his stricter critical conscience’ (1.70), and accept as authentic an anecdote recorded by William Rufus Chetwood in Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Ben Jonson, Esq (Dublin, 1756, 25-6) that the play ‘had prodigious success, and, as Ben himself, in a letter to a friend, says, "so unmerited, that, for the time to come, he would feed the swine with the husks or chaff of wit, since the good grain [i.e. Catiline] they had no relish for”’. But Chetwood was known from the first to be fanciful and unreliable. There are no grounds for thinking that Jonson denigrated a play he was to dedicate to the King; indeed, the induction claims just the opposite — ‘he prays you to believe his ware is still the same’ (121). It is far more likely that in writing the apology Jonson sought understanding for what he knew was a masterpiece, innovative and therefore open to misapprehension.

Even so, the very writing of an ‘apology’ — which was presumably burnt and lost in 1623 along with the fuller commentary on Horace (‘An Execration upon Vulcan’, 89-91, Und. 43.89-91) — implies that there had been a mixed reception. This is borne out by the most explicit account, in ‘A Funeral Elegy’ on Jonson by John Taylor the ‘water poet’: ‘His play of Barthol. Fair gave much delight / To all, but such as understood not right’ (93-4; see the Literary Record, Electronic Edition). This statement seems the more trustworthy and discriminating because it is immediately followed by an account of the failure of The Magnetic Lady.

It may well be, however, that ‘such as understood not right’ were primarily those puritans who were hostile to theatre. Not long after writing the play Jonson asked his friend John Selden’s advice on the interpretation of Deuteronomy, 22.5, the basis of the key puritan argument against the theatre (exploited by Busy at 5.5.77-9): ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto the man, neither shall a man put on woman’s raiment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.’ Selden was to reply on 28 February 1616 in a formidably erudite letter, brushing aside puritanical readings of the verse (Rosenblatt & Schleiner, 1999; see Electronic Edition, Letters to Jonson). Presumably Jonson had turned to Selden because he felt the need to arm himself against puritan criticism.

Moreover, when Pepys saw the play on 7 September 1661 he was to record: ‘Here was Bartholomew Fair with the puppet-show acted today, which had not been these forty years (it being so satirical against puritanism they durst not till now)’ (Craig, 1990, 230). Consequently Herford and Simpson assert: ‘Soon after 1620 the play, at least in its complete form, disappeared from the stage’ (2.131). There is no need, however, to take Pepys’s account so literally. In Jonsonus Virbius (1638), Henry Ramsay’s elegy includes an ironic list of Jonson’s ‘faults’:

That he exposed you zealots, to make known
Your profanation and not his own?
That one of such a fervent nose should be
Posed by a puppet in Divinity?

It follows that, despite puritan opposition, Busy’s clash with the puppet had been performed fairly recently, since Ramsay, still an undergraduate at Christ Church, was seventeen on matriculation in June 1635 and the play was still unpublished. Nevertheless, while Pepys’s account of what was performed before he was born cannot be strictly accurate, it does confirm that the play was known to have aroused puritan hostility.

It is clear from Taylor and Ramsay that the play had not disappeared from the stage, whether after the initial pair of performances or a longer run, but had successfully established itself in the theatrical repertoire. The unique dedication of this professional’s play to a king also implies, at the least, that it was a success at court, since even Jonson, in his stubborn defensiveness, would not have insulted King James’s memory with a play that he had not enjoyed. In the intermean after Act 3 of The Staple of News, the gossip Censure refers in passing to Zeal-of-the-land Busy (51), while in ‘An Expostulation’ Jonson comments on the new magistrate Inigo Jones: ‘How would he firk, like Adam Overdo, / Up and about, dive into cellars, too, / Disguised, and thence drag forth enormity’ (79-82). In Brome’s The Weeding of the Covent Garden (1632-4), a play influenced throughout by Bartholomew Fair (Butler, 1984, 151-8), Justice Cockbrain recalls and is based on ‘my reverend ancestor Justice Adam Overdo’ (2.1.1n.). The point of these references is that familiarity with characters in a play that was still unpublished is taken for granted: the play must have been performed so often that audiences could be relied on to pick up the allusions.

Numerous less explicit echoes suggest that Bartholomew Fair was a major presence in theatrical and literary experience well before it was published. For example, Cokes’s yearning to catch a thief is closely followed by an episode in Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, or The Mayor of Queenborough (c. 1619-20), 5.1, the earliest clear-cut sign of the play’s influence (see 3.5.29n.). As Baskerville (1908-09), 125 notes, the episodes have the same pattern of a stupid clown’s pitting himself against cheaters, only to lose, and a shrewder clown’s censuring him only to become a more notable victim. Jonson’s induction (notes to 66-7 and 78-9) is echoed in the preface to Shakespeare’s first Folio, while Richard Brathwait’s character-sketch of ‘A Zealous Brother’ in Whimsies (1631) is close to Busy (1.6.36n.). The Drinking Academy, 3.2, where Jack Bidstand sings a ballad while Tom Nimmer robs Simple, is very closely based on Jonson’s 3.5, and if, as its editors claim, this play is by Thomas Randolph, then it will have been written in or close to 1628. (It is not impossible, however, that it was written in the 1640s by an imitator, Robert Baron: see Moore Smith, 1930.)

Various other possible signs of early influence have been noted (Bentley, JCS, 4.885, 902; 5.1167, 1238). Middleton’s The Widow (c. 1616) includes in 4.2 a pickpocketing episode where the thief deflects his crimes onto an innocent and where the theft enables him to exploit a magistrate’s blank warrants. A Cambridge academic comedy in Latin, Fucus Histriomastix (1623), probably by Robert Ward, features an aggressively antitheatrical and hypocritical puritan on the general lines of Busy. James Shirley’s The Witty Fair One (1628) includes, in Brains and the Tutor, belligerent servingmen with some similarity to Wasp. When Brains insists in 5.4 that he will be mad ‘in spite of any man here; who shall hinder me if I have a mind to it?’ he resembles the knotty perversity of Wasp: ‘I am not i’the right, nor never was i’the right, nor never will be i’the right, while I am in my right mind’ (4.4.58-9). In none of these plays, however, is direct influence certain.

It is also possible (as argued by Perkinson, 1936) that Bartholomew Fair initiated a genre of topographical comedy especially popular in the 1630s, notably Marmion’s Holland’s Leaguer (1631), Shirley’s Hyde Park (1632), Nabbes’s Covent Garden (1633) and Tottenham Court (1633), and Brome’s The Weeding of the Covent Garden and The Sparagus Garden (1635). But (as pointed out by T. Miles, 1942), any influence from Jonson’s use of place is not deeply assimilated, since the detailed London settings of these plays are confined to a few scenes of local colour; they are not intrinsic to the whole play, like the Fair to the Fair.

A rare token of the play’s standing is its appearance in the commonplace book of an Anglican divine, Abraham Wright (1611-90), a man of literary interests who had acted at university. His detailed comments on the printed texts of twenty-eight plays — the most detailed comments on contemporary drama between Jonson himself and Dryden — were probably compiled in the early 1640s, and show a Caroline preference for the Beaumont and Fletcher tradition of tragicomedy. Hamlet and The Staple of News, for example, are dismissed as ‘indifferent’ plays, but Bartholomew Fair is relished:

A good play . . . Almost any scene is good where Cokes, who is a silly gentleman, or Wasp, who is an old testy fellow his man, or Purecraft, who is a she-puritan, or Busy, who is a he-one, or Ursula, who is a huge fat [pig] woman and soundly baffled for’t, or Leatherhead, who is also Lantern that shows the puppet play, or Nightingale a ballad singer, or the costermonger, or Troubleall a madman, comes in.

(Kirsch, 1969, 256-7)

Even under Cromwell, the play remained a familiar source of allusion: in The Surfeit (1656), Philip Kynder argues that limiting analysis of ancient Greek social custom to what can be found in the poets and dramatists would be ‘as if one in future age should make all England in ages past to be a Bartholomew Fair, because Ben Jonson hath writ it, or that the condition of all our English women may be drawn out of Shakespeare’s merry wives of Windsor’ (Bradley and Adams, 1922, 313).

It can safely be assumed, then, that Bartholomew Fair was well known in its own day (Teague, 1985, 50). But who was performing it, since Henslowe, who must have paid for it, died in January 1616, and the Lady Elizabeth’s company flourished for only a short time in London before becoming a touring company (and hence unlikely to perform a play requiring such a large cast and so many props)? A Lady Elizabeth’s company did return to London in the early 1620s, but Henry Ramsay can have been only about seven when it disappeared at King Charles’s accession. It is very probable that by the time Ramsay saw the play, and probably years earlier, it had been taken over by the King’s Men, by far the richest and most powerful company of the period, for which most of Jonson’s work had been written. This is almost certainly what happened by 1625 with a much lesser Lady Elizabeth’s play, The Honest Man’s Fortune, by John Fletcher and others (ed. Ioppolo, xviii-xix).[.] The leading Lady Elizabeth’s actors, Nathan Field and Joseph Taylor, 5.3.61-2 and 67 notes), transferred to starring roles with the King’s Men in 1616 and 1619 respectively, while in 1669 Bartholomew Fair is included in a reliable list of over 100 King’s Men plays (Bentley, JCS, 1.121; Van Lennep, 1965, 151).

1660-1700

Since no performances of Bartholomew Fair are recorded between its dual première and the closure of the theatres in 1642, its popularity with early audiences can only be inferred from incidental allusions. Superficially, its popularity in the three-quarters of a century following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the consequent re-opening of the theatres is more a matter of record, with eleven individual performances known up to 1700, and well over thirty in the first three decades of the eighteenth century (see Appendix 1 below). But the bald figures are treacherous; they have, for example, misled Frances Teague into declaring that there was a marked decline in productions after an initial rush in 1661, that the play was neglected in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and that there was ‘a flurry of revivals’ early in the next century (1985, 70, 76, 79). Such conclusions are vulnerable because a mere 7% of the performances of all works in London theatres over the four decades following the Restoration can be positively identified (Milhous and Hume, 1996, v), whereas early in the new century London theatres began advertising many of their performances in the Daily Courant, the city’s newspaper, so that nearly all of them (and many of their leading performers) are known. In the decades before such advertising became common practice, it is pure chance whether a particular performance is recorded or not. Bartholomew Fair seems to have been especially popular in the 1660s, for example — with nine of the eleven later seventeenth-century performances falling in this decade — merely because Samuel Pepys (whose diary covers only 1660-69) loved the play and saw it repeatedly. We know it was being performed in Dublin at Christmas 1670 only because of the tragic deaths of some members of the audience.

According to identifiable performances, the play was off the stage between 1674 and 1702, but John Downes records in his Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage (1708) that the famous comedian James Nokes took the part of Cokes, and he can have done so only between 1682 and his retirement from the stage c. 1691 (Downes, 1987, 42). Moreover, in 1691 Gerard Langbaine (who was not born until 1656) says of Bartholomew Fair in his Account of the English Dramatic Poets: ‘This play has frequently appeared on the stage since the Restoration, with great applause’ (Bradley and Adams, 1922, 432), while Charles Gildon confirms in his 1699 continuation of Langbaine that the play has been ‘acted with good applause since King Charles the Second’s Restoration’ (Bentley, 1945, 2.257). Actual performances across the decades must have far outweighed the few recorded by chance: it is known, for example, that in 1662 Dr Edward Browne paid one shilling and sixpence to see the play acted by the King’s Company, but it is not known exactly when (Noyes, 1935, 224). It may even be significant that Pepys notes in his diary for 12 November 1661 that he has seen a certain form of the play ‘often’, though the diary records only two occasions.

For two decades after the Restoration, London theatre was dominated by two competing patent companies: the King’s Company, led by Thomas Killigrew, and the Duke’s Company, under Sir William Davenant until his death in 1668. Downes, who was prompter with Duke’s from 1662 to 1706, recorded much later that Bartholomew Fair was formally assigned to the King’s Men on 8 April 1663, not as one of ‘their principal old stock plays’ (which included Volpone, The Alchemist, and Epicene) but among ‘old plays [that] were acted but now and then; yet, being well performed, were very satisfactory to the town’ (1987, 25-6). Duke’s, a company largely of inexperienced actors, started at Salisbury Court and moved soon to Lincoln’s Inn Fields and a theatre that had the up-to-date advantage of changeable scenery, before moving triumphantly in 1671 to the Dorset Garden Theatre. From November 1660 until May 1663, the King’s Company performed in the Vere Street Theatre made out of Gibbons’s tennis court, but this lacked changeable scenery and the competition forced the troupe to move in 1663 to Bridges Street, Drury Lane, to the first of a series of theatres that was to make that name the most renowned in London’s theatrical history. At first the advantage lay with this company, which had performance rights to a rich repertoire of Renaissance plays, as well as the more experienced actors. But Davenant and his successors adapted more readily to the changing public, revising plays to exploit a new taste for music in drama and for elaborate staging, and by 1682 the Duke’s Company was strong enough to absorb the King’s into a new United Company and take over its repertoire. The formal union was on 4 May, and acting began on 15 November. Bartholomew Fair is included in the list of plays said by Downes to have been revived by the new company (1987, 82).

Bartholomew Fair was an obvious and yet controversial play to restore to the stage early in the Restoration — obvious because of Jonson’s standing and the play’s earlier popularity, and because of the appeal of its anti-puritan satire to royalists in London, but controversial precisely because of the force of that satire in a city that was still predominantly puritan and wary of the restored monarch. Charles II evidently liked the play: he was present when Pepys was in the audience on 7 September 1661; there were command performances for him in July 1667 and November 1674; and it was performed at court in February 1669. To many, this liking of the King’s was hardly a recommendation.

The explosive potential of Bartholomew Fair was evident in reactions to a disaster at the Theatre Royal, Smock Alley, Dublin, on 26 December 1670, when the theatre galleries suddenly collapsed during a gala holiday production, and four people died (with early reports claiming as many as eighteen deaths). The crash happened, according to eye-witnesses, when Busy was put in the stocks. Moreover, according to one report, Busy was being played as a caricature of the eminent puritan divine, Richard Baxter (Baxter, 1696, 84). (The temptation to relate so vivid a character to real life has not been resisted: some recent productions, such as Richard Eyre’s for the National Theatre in 1988 and Laurence Boswell’s for the RSC in 1997, have had the actor mimic the Ulster politician, the Rev. Ian Paisley.) Though the impersonation of Baxter is unproven, Nonconformists certainly viewed the catastrophe — a bizarre parallel to the climax of Milton’s recently licensed and advertised Samson Agonistes — as the act of an angry God. An Irish Presbyterian preacher reported:

And there, among other parts of the play, the poor shadow of a Nonconformist minister is mocked and upbraided . . . But behold, when his shadow is brought to the stocks, as an affront upon Presbyterian ministers and to teach great persons to deal with like severity toward them, down came the upper gallery on to the middle one, where gentlemen and others sat, and that gallery broke too, and much of it fell down on the lords and ladies . . . Such providences, so circumstantial in divers respects, will not pass without the observation of impartial and prudent persons.

(W. S. Clark, 1955, 69-70)

To extremer puritans, this supposed act of divine vengeance fulfilled their horror at an earlier and apparently even more provocative occasion. On 12 October 1661, the Rev. William Hooke, a puritan minister, wrote to a friend about the outrageous Play of a Puritan performed before the King, three bishops, and some of the highest in the land. It caricatured the dress and manner of Baxter and another leading puritan divine, Edmund Calamy, ‘with such scripture expressions as I am loath to mention . . . one representing the Puritan put in the stocks for stealing a pig, and the stocks found by him unlocked, which he admires at as a wonderful providence and fruit of prayer . . . Some present, who were far from liking the Puritan, were greatly astonished, wondering the house did not fall upon their heads’ (H&S, 9.246). Hooke continues: ‘The play, I hear, was taken out of one or two of Ben Jonson’s’, and the exploitation of Bartholomew Fair, presumably along with The Alchemist, is unmistakable. (This statement confirms that scholars who identify this play with Bartholomew Fair itself must be mistaken.)

A weightier re-working of Bartholomew Fair also reveals the disturbing force of that play in early Restoration society. In John Wilson’s satiric comedy The Cheats, first performed in 1663, Scruple the central character is a puritan divine based on Busy — though, as Michael Cordner (1999, 176) has argued, there is enough distinctiveness to avoid mere duplication. The Cheats was the first comedy written and performed after the King’s return to deal with critical issues of politics and religion in an explicitly Restoration setting, and this entry into uncharted territory led to repeated trouble with the censor. In 1663 it was highly controversial to expose a silenced minister to mockery, and even the King felt a need to respond to objections. Audiences watching The Cheats would have been pervasively aware of Bartholomew Fair, not only because Wilson is so Jonsonian a writer but also through what Cordner terms his ‘intertextual gamesmanship’ (176). Scruple provided a bravura role for the great King’s Company comedian John Lacy (c. 1615-81), a leading member of the company from the outset and a favourite actor of the King and also of Pepys, an actor who relished taking risks with his parts and his audiences. (Information on individual performers, 1660-1735, here and below is drawn largely from Burnim et al., 1973-93.) No early cast lists for Bartholomew Fair survive, but since Lacy was an established success as Ananias in The Alchemist and is also known to have played Captain Otter and Falstaff, it is very likely that he played Busy. Throughout The Cheats it is probable that the audience was aware of Jonsonian actors playing deft variations on Jonsonian roles.

Another instance of an early Restoration dramatist responding with relish to Zeal-of-the-land Busy comes with a recently discovered play dated 1662 on the title page, News from Geneva, or The Lewd Levite, by William Lawrence. The principal object of Lawrence’s satire is the Puritan title character Levi, and, among various Jonsonian echoes, he meets the same fate as Busy when he is put in the stocks. Lawrence’s connections and sympathies had previously been with the revolutionary government, but in presenting Levi as a Puritan ready to ‘bring a text for rebellion’ — that is, to offer biblical justification for revolution — he may be seeking to rehabilitate himself under the monarchy. (Private communication from Martin Wiggins.)

The conflict of response aroused by a play that was of canonical authority and yet highly provocative is revealed most intimately by the one habitual theatre-goer of those years who has left his feelings on record: Samuel Pepys, lover of women, music, and the theatre, a puritan in his youth and an admirer of Oliver Cromwell, but now a firm Anglican and a loyal servant of the restored monarchy. His diary for 8 June 1661 includes: ‘Then I went to the Theatre and there saw Bartlemew Fair, the first time it was acted nowadays. It is [a] most admirable play and well acted; but too much profane and abusive.’ On 7 September, he records seeing the play again: ‘And here was Bartholomew Fair, with the puppet show, acted today, which had not been these forty years (it being so satirical against puritanism, they durst not till now; which is strange they should already dare to do it, and the King to countenance it); but I do never a whit like it the better for the puppets, and rather the worse.’ This can hardly mean that the puppets had been entirely absent, since the play would have been left without Act 5 and a denouement. Presumably the action had jumped from puppet Dionysius’ exasperated awakening at the end of 5.4 to Justice Overdo’s intervention at the end of 5.5, leaving out Busy’s earlier intervention and his humiliation by the puppet. Prudence must have dictated omitting such provocation from the earliest Restoration performances. But it seems from this performance in September 1661 and of the taunting Play of the Puritan around the same time that the players were now prepared to take more risks. Pepys’s reaction suggests that even for the broad-minded the restoration of Busy’s defeat is a gratuitous act of daring, or foolhardiness, and he is troubled that the King seems to condone it.

Still, for all his mixed feelings, Pepys was back at the play after a couple of months, on 12 November: ‘So abroad with Sir W. Pen, my wife and I, to Bartholomew Fair, with puppets (which I have seen once before, and the play without puppets often); but though I love the play as much as ever I did, yet I do not like the puppets at all, but think it to be a lessening to it.’

Pepys’s next record of a performance, on 2 August 1664, is more straightforward: ‘Thence to the King’s playhouse and there saw Bartholomew Fair, which doth still please me and is, as it is acted, the best comedy in the world, I believe.’ The praise is high, and almost exactly how he was to celebrate Volpone on 14 January the next year and Epicene on 19 September 1668. But his reactions remained divided; on 4 September 1668 (when the Fair was still running because it had been extended to a fortnight), he and friends ate a pig there, ‘but saw no sights, my wife having a mind to see the play, Bartholomew Fair, with puppets; which we did, and it is an excellent play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; only, the business of abusing the puritans begins to grow stale and of no use, they being the people that at last will be found the wisest.’

Although nothing later in the century illuminates the play’s performances and the divided reactions they aroused as much as Pepys does, Bartholomew Fair clearly remained a living element in London’s imaginative life, a source of allusion and a central instance in the discussion of drama. In 1668, for example, Francis Kirkman and Richard Head described a grotesque woman as ‘the representation of the Pig-woman in Ben’s Bartholomew Fair’ (The English Rogue, cited Bentley, 1945, 2.135), and Dryden in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy celebrates its variety as opposed to the ‘thin sown’ French drama of the time, and also its transmutation of sordid matter: ‘The copy is of price, though the original be vile’ (Craig, 1990, 249, 266). Dryden’s antagonist, Thomas Shadwell, in the preface to The Humorists (1671), celebrates it in turn as ‘one of the wittiest plays in the world’, so that ‘the most excellent Jonson put wit into the mouths of the meanest of his people, and, which is infinitely difficult, made it proper for ’em’ (Craig, 285).

Numerous glancing allusions show that the audience or reader was assumed to be entirely familiar with Bartholomew Fair, even though it was available in print only in the substantial and costly F2 until the even more substantial F3 of 1692 and the collected works in multiple volumes of 1716 and 1729. In Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-All (acted 1667), for example, the character Warner grumbles: ‘Why, sir, are you stark mad? . . . He’s gone! Now is he as earnest in the quarrel as Cokes among the puppets; ’tis to no purpose, whatever I do for him’ (5.1; Bradley and Adams, 337). In Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676), Sir Samuel exclaims: ‘Ha! What’s here, a rope? I am delivered as Rabbi Busy was, by miracle. I’ll slide down from the window into the garden’ (Act 4; Bentley, 1945, 2.170). Cokes’s self-nickname of ‘resolute Bat’ is repeatedly invoked (1.5.50n.). The whole play was seen as a quasi-proverbial source of graphic situations. Introducing City Politics (1683), John Crowne asks rhetorically: ‘Is it possible I should be such a Bartholomew Cokes to pull out my purse in a fair, and as soon as ever a knave tickled my ear with a straw — a little, silly flattery — I should let go my discretion and perhaps my fortune?’ (Bentley, 1945, 2.184). Similarly, in 1690 Thomas D’Urfey published a burlesque poem, ‘Collin’s Walk through London and Westminster’, in which Collin the puritanical provincial is taken to a performance of Bartholomew Fair. He believes himself at a non-conformist conventicle until Busy is put in the stocks — at which he draws his sword and creates an uproar, ‘For sake of brotherhood to ease him, / And from his wooden shame release him’ (Noyes, 1935, 230-3). Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), assumes when he meets outrageous blasphemies in the mouth of chaplain Bull in Vanbrugh’s The Relapse that ‘the thought is borrowed from Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, only the profaneness is mightily improved’ (109).

Clearly Bartholomew Fair was living theatre up to and beyond the end of the seventeenth century. It was accepted as one of Jonson’s great plays, though it tended to be placed a little behind his three comedies of 1605-10. For example, Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, writes in Theatrum Poetarum (1675): ‘In three of his comedies, namely The Fox, Alchemist, and Silent Woman, [Jonson] may be compared . . . as well with the chief of the ancient Greek and Latin comedians as the prime of modern Italians . . . nor is his Bartholomew Fair much short of them’ (Bradley and Adams, 1922, 379). This judgment became standard, and was echoed by other writers, e.g. William Winstanley in 1684 (Bradley and Adams, 407) and Sir Thomas Pope Blount in 1694 (Bentley, 1945, 2.236).

Unfortunately, little can be known about how the play was performed. That Busy is said to steal a pig in both The Play of the Puritan and ‘Collin’s Walk’, works nearly thirty years apart, suggests that this had become a traditional piece of comic business. Very few actors can be linked with given roles, although members of the acting companies are listed year-by-year in part 1 of The London Stage. As mentioned above, the leading comic actor John Lacy starred as Busy. John Downes also notes: ‘Mr Wintersel [William Wintershall] was good in tragedy as well as in comedy, especially in Cokes in Bartholomew Fair; that the famous comedian Nokes came in that part far short of him’ (1987, 42). This is praise indeed because Nokes was to be celebrated by Colley Cibber in his Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) and seems to have been born to play Cokes: he ‘was an actor of a quite different genius from any I have ever read, heard of, or seen . . . and yet his general excellence may be comprehended in one article, viz. a plain and palpable simplicity of nature . . . utterly his own’. Nokes played with the Duke’s Company, which only had access to Jonson’s plays after the amalgamation with King’s in 1682. The part of Cokes had earlier belonged to Wintershall, who also played Sir Amorous LaFoole and possibly Subtle and who had died in 1679.

Although little that is precise can be known about performances, there is no reason to doubt that standards remained high. The performers were the star actors of the day, and, as Pepys wrote of the performance on 2 August 1664, Bartholomew Fair ‘doth still please me and is, as it is acted, the best comedy in the world, I believe’.

1700-1735

Superficially, the details recorded in Appendices 1 and 2 below would suggest that in the first three decades of the eighteenth century the popularity of Bartholomew Fair was at its zenith, so that the abrupt succession of two centuries of absence from the stage would be inexplicable. Thirty-four performances are known within these decades, after only thirteen in the previous eighty-six years, while it is also known who played the major roles at most of them. Properly seen, however, these years saw the play’s reputation beginning to decline. Bartholomew Fair was the first of Jonson’s great comedies to drop out of the repertoire — it anticipated by almost half a century his virtual disappearance from the stage between about 1776 and his gradual renaissance in the twentieth century.

As mentioned above, the crucial distinction between records before and after 1700 is that over a few years early in the new century the acting companies began advertising their performances and publicising their star actors, initially in the Daily Courant. Whereas very few performances from 1660-1700 can be positively identified, most performances at Drury Lane were being advertised, often with cast lists, by 1703-4 and records are close to complete from 1705, while the rival company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields was advertising fairly regularly by early 1704. After 1706 almost all performances are known (Milhous and Hume, 1996, v, and year-by-year introductions).

An average of slightly more than one performance a year over 1702-31 suggests that Bartholomew Fair remained an established but secondary favourite, a welcome though marginal part of the repertoire. It is noticeable, however, that despite a late cluster of eleven performances in 1718-22, the play was on stage markedly more in the first dozen years of the period than in the following eighteen, and the 1731 performance was the first for almost a decade. Moreover, the popularity of the play in those earlier years seems to have been very much bound up with the actual Fair: eight of the nineteen performances were during the Fair or in the approach to it, and some advertisements make the connection explicit. The appeal of the performance for 22 August 1707, for example, is its ‘being the last time of acting till after the Fair’ and on 26 August 1712 its ‘being the last time of acting this season’, while on 31 August 1708 the seasonal topicality of the play was heightened by performing it ‘with beadles, officers, and attendants belonging to the Powder Court’. The play was still beloved, but partly as a seasonal entertainment, rather like a Christmas show, and not solely for its own merits.

The sad final token of the play’s fall in esteem was its re-emergence, at fair time, in 1735, after a solitary revival in thirteen years, and advertised (not quite accurately) as ‘not acted these seven years’. It was given not, as for years past, at Drury Lane but at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in what must have been a severely revised form, since the list of characters included Ananias, Valentine, Rover, Silence, Toyman, Nut Woman, Florella, Loveit, and Pickleherring, as if Jonson’s original cast were not rich enough. Moreover, it was performed by a much less well-known team of actors than those who had held the stage so long. Several of them were to remain so little known that they can be identified solely by the plain surnames used in the advertisements. It cannot have been much of a success, as it was performed only the once. With this travesty, Bartholomew Fair disappeared from the stage for 186 years.

Until the early 1720s, the play had been acted by strong and consistent casts of leading actors. Time and again, John Littlewit was played by Henry Norris (1665-1731), ‘Jubilee Dicky’, one of London’s most popular comic actors, who, with his odd, squeaky voice, was especially noted for playing cuckolds, weak husbands, and fops such as Sir Politic Would-be and Osric, and was notorious for ad-libbing. John’s wife Win was taken by Margaret Saunders (1686-c. 1745), who also played Dol from The Alchemist and Lady Haughty. Mary Powell, who played Dame Purecraft, is recorded as an actress from 1686, but is not known to have taken the part after 1711; her name disappeared from the playbills after the 1713-14 season. It is unlikely that Quarlous was given a dynamic or charismatic performance at this time, as the part was taken by John Mills (at Drury Lane from 1695, d. 1736), a good utility actor in a great variety of roles, but inexpressive in voice and features. He was to be described by Cibber as ‘an honest, quiet, careful man, of as few faults as excellencies’. William Bullock (c. 1667-1742), who played Cokes until he left Drury Lane for the rival theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1715 and was succeeded by Josias (or Joseph) Miller (1684-1738), was a more considerable actor and the patriarch of an acting family. By 1702 he was called ‘the best comedian that has trod the stage since Nokes’, and Steele in The Tatler wrote he was ‘a person of much wit and ingenuity’, with ‘a peculiar talent of looking like a fool’ (24 April 1709). Aptly for Cokes, he made much of being unusually tall. Wasp was played for decades by the dramatist’s namesake, Benjamin Johnson (1665-1742). Describing him as ‘our present Roscius’, Charles Gildon said that he acted Wasp with ‘such an engagement in the part that I could not persuade myself that it was acting but the reality’ (Life of Betterton, 1710). Theophilus Keene (1680-1718), a specialist in heavy, blunt parts such as Voltore and Casca, played Justice Overdo until he transferred to Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1715, when he was succeeded by Charles Shepard (1675-1748), who was also to play Captain Otter, Lovewit, Mammon, and Falstaff. Ursula was always a male role at this time, and was usually played by Richard Cross (fl. c. 1695-1725), a utility actor who played secondary roles such as Polonius, suggesting that Ursula was not seen as the dominant figure she has been in some modern interpretations.

On the other hand, Busy was clearly seen as the role and was the only role to pass from star to star: John Bickerstaff (d. c. 1724), Colley Cibber (1671-1757), and George Pack (fl. 1700-24). Cibber, in particular, was the most important figure in the London theatre of the eighteenth century until the emergence of David Garrick, and was an outstanding performer of fops and other comic roles such Justice Shallow in 2 Henry 4. He became one of a triumvirate of actors who ran Drury Lane effectively for two decades. Bickerstaff, who took leading roles from about 1708, was another with a flair for comedy, though he also played more serious roles.

With helpers in the lesser roles and with occasional changes, this team performed the play until the early 1720s, apart from a disgruntled group — not large enough to weaken the company seriously — who left for the troupe at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1715. But by the 1720s Theophilus Keene was dead and others were reaching the end of their careers. When Bartholomew Fair was produced after a lapse of years in 1731, only Benjamin Johnson and Charles Shepard were still in the cast. There was a little further continuity in that Theophilus Cibber (1703-58), who played Cokes, was the son of Colley, and William Mills (1701-50) was following his father John in the part of Quarlous. But otherwise the cast was completely new to the play and seems to have performed it only once. Similarly, there is no continuity at all in the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Company who performed the free variation on the play in 1735. It may be that the dedication of the original team to Bartholomew Fair prolonged its stage career, and that the failure of their successors to build up a momentum in performing it hastened its departure. Moreover, Leo Hughes argues of the London theatre ‘that the mid-seventeen-twenties . . . represent a kind of watershed in taste. Two changes were rapidly taking place: first, a further flight from head to ears and eyes, the shift to eyes requiring only a year or two; second, a sharp increase in the number of theatre-goers’ (1971, 97, cited Jensen, 1985, 11). The abrupt fall from any popularity of Bartholomew Fair may well have reflected this suddenly enhanced preference, emphasised by an influx of inexperienced theatregoers, for variety entertainment over verbal and intellectual drama.

The play’s sudden loss of favour may well coincide — among all theatre-goers, sophisticated as well as inexperienced — with the growing adulation of Jonson’s ‘mighty opposite’, Shakespeare. As Jonathan Bate observes: ‘If we had to identify a single decade in which the "cult of Shakespeare” took root, in which his celebrity and influence came to outstrip that of his contemporaries once and for all, it would probably be the 1730s’, when cheap editions proliferated and the plays came to make up a quarter of the entire repertoire of the London stage, twice what they had been (Bate and Rasmussen, 2007, 47).

As is apparent in Appendix 1, there was more consistency in the performers in the early years of the century than in their managements. The United Company formed in 1682 had split in 1694-5, when a co-operative of actors led by Thomas Betterton (1635-1710) — the greatest English actor between Burbage and Garrick — rebelled against the Drury Lane management in the unscrupulous hands of Christopher Rich, who had taken active control in 1693. The co-operative was granted a licence by the Lord Chamberlain to establish a new company at the second Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. Rich was left with an enfeebled company, but this included some actors of great promise at the beginning of their careers such as Cibber, Johnson, and William Bullock, and despite the company’s discontent under Rich it steadily became more successful. Meanwhile the more experienced rebels struggled and squabbled in an inadequate theatre and the situation became so extreme that the Lord Chamberlain intervened and put the management in the hands of Betterton. But in 1704 the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh succeeded Betterton and proposed building a new Queen’s Theatre in Haymarket for the Lincoln’s Inn Fields troupe. The opening of this in April 1705 made the actors’ troupe a much more potent opposition, though the leading rebels were now reaching the end of their careers, while Rich’s Drury Lane company, the performers of Bartholomew Fair, were maturing into a very accomplished ensemble. In September 1706 Vanbrugh found himself forced into an uncomfortable compromise: he had to surrender what he most wanted, the right to perform opera and dance, in return for being allowed to hire nine of Drury Lane’s best actors. Rich was again left with an inadequate acting troupe, but now had the profitable rights to music and dance. So it came about that the performances of Bartholomew Fair in the 1706-7 season were by Vanbrugh’s company in Haymarket, though the leading members of the cast (who are first recorded in August 1707) had actually learned the play while performing at Drury Lane.

By the next season, however, the actors were back at Drury Lane. Rich’s singers there were in open mutiny by the autumn of 1707, and Vanbrugh began approaching them. On 31 December 1707 the Lord Chamberlain pronounced an ‘Order of Union’ which amalgamated the acting companies at Drury Lane under Rich and gave Vanbrugh the right he sought to perform opera at the Queen’s Theatre. But the opera singers demanded such inflated salaries that within months Vanbrugh had to hand over the management of Queen’s to Owen Swiney (1680-1754), an associate of Rich who was to turn against his mentor. Two or three years of complicated and heated manoeuvres followed and transformed the running of Drury Lane. Initially, three leading actors — Colley Cibber, Robert Wilks (c. 1665-1732), who was seen as Betterton’s successor in the great roles, and Richard Estcourt (1668-1712) — were brought in as co-managers, though under Rich’s tyrannical proprietorship. Then, with the Lord Chamberlain’s connivance, Rich was manoeuvred out of power. This involved the Lord Chamberlain in closing down Drury Lane because of Rich’s misdemeanours — hence the 1710 performance of Bartholomew Fair is back at Queen’s Theatre, under Swiney. Then in November 1710 the actors moved back into Drury Lane, now under the proprietorship of Swiney, with Wilks and Cibber joined as managers by the talented comic actor, Thomas Doggett (c. 1670?-1721). This at last made possible the relief of a sustained period of relative stability. Swiney was forced out in May 1711, and the addition of the actor Barton Booth (1679?-1733) to the managerial team in 1713-14 brought about the acrimonious departure of Doggett, and from then the Cibber/Wilks/Booth triumvirate ran the company at Drury Lane for some twenty years, with Bartholomew Fair performed many of these years before slipping out of the repertoire. Even the loss of several actors in 1714-15 to the new theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields — an initiative of the persistent Christopher Rich, though he died before the theatre opened — was not a serious disruption of these successful decades.

In the earlier years of the century, Bartholomew Fair remained high in critical esteem, and familiarity with the play could be taken for granted. In 1711, for example, Bernard Lintot published a handsome, posthumous collection of plays by George Farquhar, and the frontispiece shows Jonson, displaying a copy of Bartholomew Fair, formally presenting Farquhar to Apollo, god of the arts and leader of the Muses (Farquhar, 1988, 2.frontispiece). Writing in The Champion on 15 March 1740, Henry Fielding could say familiarly: ‘No character is oftener represented on the stage of the world than that of Justice Overdo in the Nest of Fools; men often become ridiculous or odious by over-acting even a laudable part’ (Fielding, ed. Coley, 2003, 233 — Fielding is running together Overdo and the discomfited justices Squelch and Bullfinch in The Northern Lass, or the Nest of Fools, c. 1629, by Jonson’s follower Brome). As performances faded further into the past, the play’s standing became less secure. Primarily because of the criticism of Shakespeare in the Induction, bardolatrous critics cited it as a prime instance of Jonson’s supposed jealousy of the greater dramatist. It was at best seen, in the words of David Erskine Baker in 1764, as having ‘an infinite deal of humour in it, and is, perhaps, the greatest assemblage of characters that ever was brought together within the compass of one single piece’ (Craig, 1990, 492). But even those more sympathetic saw it as dated and shapeless. For example, Dr John Brown (1715-66), who had written two tragedies staged by the great actor David Garrick and was used by him as a reader of new plays, wrote to him of the play in 1765: ‘Its comic merit, in point of character, is universally allowed to be of the first degree. In point of plan, it goes well upon the whole, till the third or fourth act, and then falls into nonsense and absurdity.’ Tantalisingly, he was writing to Garrick about a revision of the play by Brown himself in line with contemporary taste, removing the ‘nonsense and absurdity’ and ‘retaining, at the same time, every the least scrap of what is thinly scattered through the bad parts of it, such as might be worth preserving . . . The Pig-woman certainly cannot be removed without spoiling the whole; for on her depend all the fine comic scenes . . . In short, she is the great connecting circumstance that binds the whole together’ (Craig, 497). Shortly afterwards, he wrote again: ‘I pique myself more on rectifying this plan, than on any plan I ever struck out in my life. It is amazing to think how any writer could do so well, and so ill, at the same time, as Ben Jonson did in this comedy’ (Craig, 498). Unfortunately, nothing came of this revision (which is now lost); otherwise a version of Bartholomew Fair might have revived the play, at least for the few years until Garrick left the stage in 1776.

The Return to the Stage

Left without a performance by Garrick, Bartholomew Fair was doomed to remain off the stage for almost 200 years, until a revival by the deliberately named Phoenix Society in 1921, at a time when — as indicated by T. S. Eliot’s classic essay of 1919 — Jonson was at last beginning to be appreciated again. (There is a tantalising hint that a slightly earlier production may have been envisaged in a simple design for Bartholomew Fair by the noted illustrator and stage designer Claud Lovat Fraser (1890-1921). This survives in the collection of designs by himself and his wife and collaborator Grace Crawford Lovat Fraser at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania ( www.brynmawr.edu/library/speccoll/guides/fraserart.shtml ), and was dated 1917 by Grace Crawford. The literary and theatrical connections of the young couple were extensive, but there is nothing to link this drawing with a particular project or with the Phoenix Society, although in 1923 the widow was to become an associate of the Society’s chief stage designer, Norman Wilkinson, in a firm designing theatre scenery and costumes.)

During the Romantic and Victorian periods, many had found the play shocking — even some modern productions have bowdlerised its bawdy and sometimes sacrilegious language. Leigh Hunt, for example, thought it ‘full of the absolutest and sometimes loathsomest trash’ and an anonymous writer in Temple Bar in 1874 found it ‘infinitely coarser than the coarsest thing which Smollett ever wrote’ (cited Townsend, 1947a, 11-12). A more intelligent critic than either, William Hazlitt, was not shocked, but even he was patronizing, since for him it was ‘chiefly remarkable for the exhibition of odd humours and tumbler’s tricks, and is on that account amusing to read once’ (Lectures on the Comic Writers, in Complete Works, 1930-34, 6.45). Lamb’s revelatory Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (1808) found nothing in the play worth reproducing, while Gifford’s pugnacious edition was unlikely to win the playwright many friends. Charles Dickens, a Jonsonian humorist in some of his work, was exceptional in his enjoyment of certain of the plays. Mr Stiggins of the pineapple rum and hot buttered toast, deputy shepherd of the United Grand Junction Ebenezer Temperance Association in Pickwick Papers, is in part a descendant of Zeal-of-the-land Busy, while among the items sold after Dickens’s death was a large collection of books, drawings, and ephemera relating to the actual Bartholomew Fair, as if the novelist had planned a work around it (Dutton, 1979, 231-2).

Items at that sale included no fewer than three copies of Henry Morley’s Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair (1859), and it is this first detailed study of any English fair that helped to make appreciation of the play possible again, by locating it within an event that for some 700 years was a major presence in English life, so that it could be seen as in many ways realistic, not a gratuitous wallowing in filth and corruption. Intelligent modern appreciation emerges with A Study of Ben Jonson by the poet Swinburne (1889), where the critique is summed up in a sentence majestic in its contradictions:

When all is said that can reasonably be said against the too accurate reproduction and the too voluminous exposition of vulgar and vicious nature in this enormous and multitudinous pageant — too serious in its satire and too various in its movement for a farce, too farcical in its incidents and too violent in its horseplay for a comedy — the delightful humour of its finer scenes, the wonderful vigour and veracity of the whole, the unsurpassed ingenuity and dexterity of the composition, the energy, harmony and versatility of the action, must be admitted to ensure its place for ever among the minor and coarser masterpieces of comic art.

(61-2)

Swinburne remains enough within the shadow of nineteenth-century criticism to find Bartholomew Fair ‘minor’ and ‘coarse’ in its relentless vulgar realism, yet his language is energized by the vigour, the ingenuity, and indeed the harmony to which he is responding in the work. His intuition that the satirical comedy is too serious for farce and too farcical for comedy anticipates the division of responses that runs through modern critiques of the play and that the present edition sees as essential to its enigmatic meaning. (For more extended accounts of nineteenth-century awareness of the play, see Townsend, 1947a, Jensen, 1985, and Teague, 1985.)

Swinburne’s study was a forerunner of the revival of an historicist approach to Shakespeare and a revaluation of his contemporaries that led to William Poël’s founding of the Elizabethan Stage Society in 1895 and eventually to the restoration of Bartholomew Fair to the stage, among many plays of the period. Poël’s performances of Renaissance plays were to be profoundly influential for decades to come in their experiments with what he took to be authentic style. The acting was ensemble rather than star-centred; scenery was reduced to a minimum; the stage was modelled upon his understanding of the Elizabethan stage, encouraging intimacy with the audience and freeing the plays from the cumbersome elaborations of the commercial theatre of the day. These productions were an early inspiration to Harley Granville-Barker, actor, director, playwright, and great Shakespearean critic, in founding the Incorporated Stage Society in 1899 to perform plays of artistic merit then seen as uncommercial. Performances were usually by professional actors in West End theatres, although confined to Sunday evenings. The Phoenix Society was in turn founded in 1919 under the auspices of the Stage Society specifically to perform plays by early English dramatists. It was led by one of its four founders, Allan Wade (the bibliographer of W. B. Yeats and first editor of the poet’s letters), secretary of the Stage Society in 1912-16 and an actor who had been secretary, assistant, and then close associate of Granville-Barker since 1906. In its years of existence up to 1925, the Society put on twenty-six semi-private productions, all but two of them directed by Wade and most of them to designs by Norman Wilkinson, who had become prominent through designing Granville-Barker’s acclaimed and pioneering Shakespeare productions at the Savoy. The Phoenix performances were enthusiastically supported by established actors and made a valued contribution to the theatrical avant-garde’s reassessment of Renaissance drama. Several of the revived plays successfully entered the repertory of the public stage.

This was not, however, the outcome of its production of Bartholomew Fair, which took place — as its eighth production, five months after its revival of Volpone — at the New Theatre, Oxford, on 26-7 June 1921, a Sunday evening and a Monday matinée, the first known performances of the play since the 1730s. This was a scholarly production — the programme included a long note by Montague Summers and reprinted the title page from F2 — and it can be assumed to have been more than competent, because prepared by the experienced Wade and Wilkinson for a cast including a leading actor of the day, Frank Cellier, as Justice Overdo and several other professionals well established in roles of middling importance, such as Margaret Yarde, Ben Field, Tristan Rawson, Ernest Thesiger, Clare Harris, Henry Kiell Ayliff, Edward Combermere, and Roy Byford (full details of this and subsequent modern productions are listed in Appendix 3 below). The best-informed commentators on the production thought ‘the general level of the acting was high’, although ‘there was a certain heaviness of movement, due perhaps to the episodic treatment of the characters’ (H&S, 2.249).

Unsurprisingly, however, the press reviews show that the play seemed too outlandish to be appreciated. There was no lack of praise for individual performances, notably for Byford cross-dressed as Ursula, Thesiger as Cokes, and Field as Busy, and, since many later interpretations would omit the induction, it is interesting that ‘Tarn’ in The Spectator for 2 July 1921 found this (with Wade himself as the Scrivener) highly effective. Paradoxically, however, the characters were seen as ‘merely personified eccentricities, and they behave so irrationally that we do not care a straw what becomes of any of them’ (The Times, 28 June 1921). The play itself was found to be, at most, of historical interest: ‘We were very glad, exceeding glad, very exceeding glad, when the play was over. We speak of it, of course, as an entertainment. As a "document” Bartholomew Fair is full of interest’ (The Times). Even the most positive review, in The Daily Telegraph, thought ‘the action so overlaid with detail as to make it difficult to see the wood for the trees’ and saw the play as ‘a relic of the past’, appealing to curiosity rather than the emotions (28 June 1921), while less sympathetic reviewers openly patronized its ‘primitive humour’ (H. G. in The Observer, 3 July).

Even the most intelligent discussion, by Desmond MacCarthy, who had prepared himself by reading Swinburne, is at sea with the play: ‘Nothing can be so tiresome as a man in towering spirits and of inexhaustible vitality. One gets sick of the perpetual exhibition of vulgarity, idiocy and viciousness, though there is so much energy and force in many a line and speech that if one’s stomach had not turned queasy one would admire "Ben” heartily . . . The world may not have progressed in many respects, but its sense of fun has improved’ (New Statesman, 2 July).

MacCarthy was no prude — he argues, for example, that it was a mistake for Helena Millais as Mrs Overdo not to retch into the pig-pan at the climax — yet he shares something with lesser reviewers who are handicapped by nineteenth-century notions of propriety and are disappointed to find ‘only two nice characters’ (The Spectator, 2 July), with Byford as the pig-woman ‘too rich for our stomach’ (The Times) and ‘almost too revolting for decency’ (The Observer).

The incomprehension shown here even by experienced reviewers suggests that reviving so challengingly unorthodox a comedy was not going to be straightforward. Their reactions anticipate much in the responses to this day of many less informed and prepared reviewers — usually those in the popular and provincial press — and no doubt of many in the audiences. Whereas critics and audience tend to approach Shakespeare with a respectful ease bred of his familiarity and cultural standing, the case for Jonson’s plays other than Volpone and The Alchemist has constantly to be made anew, and — except for those who have familiarised themselves with the work — the play gets the blame for any shortcomings in the production. Bartholomew Fair has often been seen as a failed attempt at a familiar mode of comedy rather than as boldly innovative. It has, consequently, too little or too much plot, since it lacks a strong central story, while the action is dispersed into a complex interweaving of episodes. I wonder if those who reiterate such complaints are bamboozled by popular television serials such as ER or EastEnders, to which sympathetic commentators have sometimes likened the play (e.g. Peter Porter, TLS, 4 November 1988)? Bartholomew Fair is seen as shapeless, when it is elegantly and symmetrically organised, act by act. That the play was off the stage for two centuries is taken to mean it cannot be stageworthy; its century and more of early popularity is overlooked. Consequently, the most obtuse reviewers resent the play as a waste of time. As an extreme example, here is Arthur Thirkell, under the heading ‘I could have done without this bore’, opening his Daily Mirror review (31 October 1969) of the first RSC production:

You can bet your boots that any play which has had only two professional revivals in 200 years is pretty lousy. With a little bit of luck I could have gone through life without ever seeing Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair. But I missed out. It was my dire misfortune to see the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of this woeful, self-indulgent, pretentious, boring, childish charade last night at the Aldwych Theatre.

But even the more committed reviewers frequently miss the point. Here, as one example among many, is Michael Anderson in a specialist journal, Plays and Players (January 1970), on the same production:

The lusty playing of Norman Rodway and Ben Kingsley [as Quarlous and Winwife] could not conceal the lack of human warmth in the two heroes whom Jonson holds up for our admiration . . . One rapidly becomes impatient with [Cokes] . . . He is a character who never develops, never learns, and hardly ever feels.

Anderson is reading Jonson as a failed Shakespeare, grumbling at blue for not being green. A glance at the names of the two ‘heroes’ might have been enough to suggest otherwise, while Cokes is clearly not an attempt at a rounded character, but epitomises the resilience of the incorrigible.

Nevertheless, Bartholomew Fair did make its way against such prejudice, and in the second half of the twentieth century re-established itself in the repertoire. Since the Second World War, there have been nearly seventy productions, both professional and amateur. In particular, it is now seen as a play to choose when a director or company has a particular challenge to meet or occasion to mark. In 1947, for example, the Marlowe Dramatic Society of Cambridge, after years of performing Shakespeare, chose to indicate a new concentration on other Renaissance playwrights with a production of Bartholomew Fair. In 1951 the Old Vic Company billed George Devine’s production as part of their Festival of Britain season, and two years later the City of London Festival Players marked the coronation with the play. Two years later still, the ADC at Cambridge staged it to mark their centenary. In 1966, the National Youth Theatre made it the showpiece of their tenth anniversary season, and invited all Members of Parliament to see this, their first major non-Shakespearean production, as part of their case for a permanent theatre. Again, Bartholomew Fair was made the opening play of the National Youth Theatre’s silver jubilee season in 1981 — another showpiece production to win support, because it was feared this season would have to be its last. Meanwhile, in 1970 Tyneside Theatre Company chose the play for the inaugural production on its large, new stage, while in 1972 the quatercentenary of Jonson’s birth was marked by a professional production at the Deutsches Nationaltheater, Weimar, and an amateur production by the Highbury Players at Sutton Coldfield. In 1978, by a coincidence the companies may have found irksome, there were overlapping showpiece productions in London: Michael Bogdanov’s inaugural production for the Young Vic, and, directed by Peter Barnes, the first independent production at the Round House for a decade, set up by its new manager, Thelma Holt. Four primarily amateur productions then made a point of choosing Bartholomew Fair for their major occasions: in 1979 it was the first main-house production of a classic by the Belgrade Youth Theatre, Coventry, and at the suggestion of a bold young director, John Curry, it was chosen for the opening spectacular at a new venue of the New Independent Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand; in 1983 it became Richmond Shakespeare Society’s first departure from Shakespeare in open-air productions; and in 1986 it marked the twenty-first birthday celebrations of the Swan Theatre, Worcester. In 1979, Ian Talbot bravely began his first season as artistic director of the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre not with the traditional Shakespeare but with Bartholomew Fair, again directed by Peter Barnes. Most significantly of all for the play’s regained status, it was with this that Richard Eyre (who had directed a successful performance at Nottingham in 1976) inaugurated his years as artistic director of the Royal National Theatre in 1988. Most recently, the Cambridge University Marlowe Society chose Bartholomew Fair as its ‘May Week’ play for 2005 — Cambridge May Week falling in June — in what was announced as an early start to celebrating the centenary that would fall in 2007.

It can hardly be coincidence that the play returned to the repertoire shortly after the Second World War, for in its comic way, it takes us through social upheavals and a radical questioning of values such as the war and its aftermath enforced. Nor is it surprising that the play entered the normal commercial theatre for the first time since the 1720s only after some exploratory productions elsewhere. The first of these, and the only version known between the Phoenix Society in 1921 and the end of the war, was a single, outdoor performance by the Players’ Club at Bryn Mawr College, inevitably with an all-female cast, on 30 April 1940. Led by Eleanor Emory, the cast developed the performance collaboratively out of a text shortened to under an hour and three-quarters by Emily Cheney, plus a new prologue by Marion Kirk and a Miss Tucker. It was also collaborative in that the college’s actors, musicians, and dancers worked together, while a tumbler, two dance groups, and other fairground entertainments were integrated into the play and intermissions. After various ups and downs, which at times made it seem as unlikely to materialise as the date of 31 April for which it was once announced, the audacious undertaking was justified by its success. This was very much a college occasion, part of annual spring festivities, and photographs suggest it was a simply staged, amateur production. Nevertheless, it remains a landmark as a performance of a neglected play - a play that has never established itself in the North American repertoire - and as the first known outdoor performance since the Hope Theatre.

But more general notice was taken of the Marlowe Dramatic Society production at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, in March 1947, of which A. P. Rossiter, renowned scholar of Renaissance drama, wrote: ‘In that Ben is only life-size on the stage, this production may not be merely good per se: it may be a stage in the education of the English theatre — where by 1947 the West End has already reached The Alchemist (the Marlowe production of 1914) and The White Devil (Marlowe, 1920 and 1931). Actors and producers largely learn by seeing, and the book of Jonson (still more the books on him) scare them’ (Cambridge Review, 19 April 1947). Meeting the previous December, the committee responsible for the 1947 production minuted that Bartholomew Fair should be undertaken ‘in spite of the difficulties of producing a play in the Arts Theatre that might be more suited to the Market Square’. It was directed by the Senior Treasurer, Donald Beves, future Senior Tutor and Vice-Provost of King’s College and a major presence in Cambridge theatre for many years, and, appropriately enough, the cast included the future Dickens scholar, Philip Collins. The production was certainly good enough to arouse interest in the play, although ‘H. H. H.’ in Cambridge Daily News (12 March), while commending the spirit of experiment and the quality of the acting, felt it was ‘much ado about so little’ and spotted a major difficulty for all directors: how to maintain a sense of the background traffic of the Fair without interfering with the activity of the principals. Rossiter, however, found the performance brought the play alive: ‘No play ever had a better send-off by Induction than the Stage-keeper gave this: with his first lines the very spirit of Ben stood conjured’, while Troubleall was ‘disturbingly crazy’ and Knockem and others revealed the Jonsonian ‘true and lasting Comedy of Inane Consistency’.

A more influential performance still may well have been a version for radio repeated on successive evenings in January 1949 on the BBC Third Programme, then a major presence in the nation’s cultural life. The play was adapted as well as directed by R. D. Smith, who reduced it to a manageable two hours, and had music by Elizabeth Lutyens and a strong cast of well-established actors, notably Cyril Cusack, Ronald Simpson, Esmé Percy, James McKechnie, John Laurie, John Slater, Douglas Seale, and the Irishman Harry Hutchinson as Captain Whit.

MAJOR PRODUCTIONS

After these preliminaries came the seminal production of the twentieth-century revival of Bartholomew Fair, by George Devine for the Old Vic Company, opening first at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1950 and then, much revised, at the Old Vic Theatre itself the following December. This was an ambitious production led by a major director, with the puppets in the expert charge of George Speaight, the distinguished historian of popular entertainments such as the puppet theatre, among as gifted a cast as the play can ever have known, even in some of the minor parts taken by Old Vic students. Several of the cast, such as Dorothy Green, Mark Dignam, Robert Eddison, Alec Clunes, Roger Livesey, Ursula Jeans, and William Devlin were established in their long and distinguished careers, while others — such as Dorothy Tutin, Heather Stannard, Leo McKern, Douglas Wilmer, Paul Rogers, and Richard Pasco — were early in such careers. Few directors can have had the luxury of a Pasco in such a tiny role as the Book-holder. Reviewers who disagree over the play and the production are largely at one in praising the individual performances, especially those of Clunes, Eddison, and Livesey as Wasp, Cokes, and Justice Overdo, respectively. It is not surprising that some reviewers of later productions keep looking back over the decades to Devine’s as the gold standard.

At Edinburgh, this was director’s theatre on a grand scale, elaborately staged, with the placings of thirty-eight actors in the last scene precisely indicated in the prompt-book. The auditorium in the Assembly Hall was huge, and the performance lasted an unparalleled three and three-quarter hours. Developing Tyrone Guthrie’s experiments at recent Festival performances, much of the action took place on a bare platform stage with the audience seated around three sides, while behind this, stretching some 150 feet across the whole width of the hall, ran the garish but seedy and well-worn stalls of the Fair, not only Ursula’s booth and the puppet theatre but also rope-dancers, a mermaid peepshow, a barber’s shop, and sellers of sweets and sweetmeats, of birds and tobacco, etc. The action took place on three levels, and there were at least a dozen places for entrances and exits. Costumes were elaborately in period with class-divisions carefully delineated. Winwife and Quarlous, for example, were stylish gallants in costumes of silk, with lace collars, wide trunk hose, elegantly turned-down boots, and plumed hats. Cokes was an exaggerated copy of such fashions, in a discord of colours. Grace wore an extremely pretty dress of glistering, pale blue satin, with a diaphanous covering for her shoulders and a coif and hat at once decorous and elegant. Dorothy Tutin made a very fetching Win, not over-dressed but charming in a pert little hat, deeply cut neckline, and small lacy ruff. Knockem, on the other hand, looked like a raffish Captain Hook with prominent spurs, while Ursula was greasy and foul.

Despite the careful realisation of the characters in dress and in performance, it was the Fair that dominated: ‘The fair is the thing, and the collection of sub-plots mere embroidery upon it’ (Tribune, 1 September); ‘There are thirty speaking parts, and they are all, like the plot itself, subordinate to the thirty-first and central character — the fair itself’ (Irving Wardle, The Times, 24 August). The playwright John Arden was to comment: ‘The main impression I retain is one of having actually been at a fair (rather than having seen a play about some fictional people at a fair)’ (1977, 32). The production anticipated many of its successors in treating the Fair not as the setting but the subject of the play.

Although some thought the performance ‘just dull’ (Evening Standard, 25 August), reviewers found much to praise: the play ‘still has extraordinary comic force. Words that lie somewhat flatly on the printed page leap into life when they are spoken as admirably as for the most part they are spoken’ (Wardle, The Times, 24 August). Nevertheless, the sheer superfluity of space available led to Devine’s concentration on the Fair damaging the performance: ‘The fair, though it is delightfully realised in Motley’s backset of booths and peepshows, goes unpeopled; only on its first appearance does it contribute a perceptible flavour. In the second part of the play, it is partially closed and wholly forgotten’ (Tribune, 1 September); ‘Alas, all this space becomes an embarrassment. It would not be embarrassing if the Old Vic could afford, in addition to the thirty actors who speak, another thirty actors who, inventively handled, would provide the spectacle with a large, vulgar, roaring vitality. Mr George Devine does what he can with the means at his disposal . . . It is nobody’s fault that a vital requirement is lacking — the hurly-burly of the fair — and that the long exits and entrances slow the pace almost disastrously’ (Wardle, The Times, 24 August). The thrust platform stage and the huge backdrop of booths created more distance between actors and audience than in a conventional proscenium theatre, with the actors’ rumps rather than their faces visible to many in the audience at any one moment. Consequently, some reviewers anticipated that the production would be more successful in a conventional space. Wardle continued: ‘The paradoxical conclusion to be drawn is that the sooner the old comedy is submitted to the compression of the ordinary stage the better.’

Four months later, reviewers were for once unanimous that the transfer to the Old Vic Theatre was pure gain. The production was trimmed down to just under three hours, while ‘the Fair is no longer strung across the horizon’ (J. C. Trewin, The Observer, 24 December). The main action was brought closer to the audience by gathering on the forestage, while the fairground crowds and scenery were behind and above on the main stage, with variety created by having reversible booths. The result was, as Trewin recorded in a second review, that the performance was given the intimacy and animation it needed (John o’London’s Weekly, 5 January 1951).

Devine’s production was important not only in that it restored the play to the commercial theatre and made the Fair the essence of Bartholomew Fair but also because it established the norm of modern interpretations in the theatre: that the play is predominantly a gay and sunny farce. An occasional reviewer saw it otherwise: ‘It is a savage and terrifying picture of the ugliest Elizabethan low life. But it is more: the Smithfield Fair is a kind of hell’ (John Barber, Daily Express, 19 December). But the prevailing impression it made, and retains in photographs, is of charm and gaiety: ‘The more often we see the play, the more endearing much of it becomes,’ writes Trewin (John o’London’s Weekly), who touchingly recalls how he had loved the play since first reading it on a cliff overlooking the sea as a boy in 1922.

In keeping with this, it was a bowdlerised production: ‘There is no justification in being unnecessarily offensive’, Devine told the Glasgow Evening Times (7 August). The fouler language was cleaned up, and Punk Alice was cut. The stress was on joy: Quarlous’s soliloquy in 4.6 was neutralised by being extensively cut: the dishonesty and self-delusion disappeared, and the ‘sport’ remained. In keeping with this, ‘Mr Eddison makes Cokes an engaging simpleton who wins every heart in the audience’ (A. G. H., Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 22 August); ‘The speeches come from him [Eddison] in great gulps of ecstasy. His eyes glow. He seems to run through life forever bending forward to see what is coming next’ (Trewin, John o’London’s Weekly). Even Busy came over as ‘a good-natured Puritan’ (Tablet, 13 January 1951). Winwife knelt devotedly at the feet of Grace when they came to their understanding. The ending had the benign jollity of farce: John ‘does not care a jot when [Win] is at last discovered lolling in a drunkard’s arms’ (Times Educational Supplement, 12 January).

However prophetic, this was not an interpretation that all could accept: ‘The trouble is that the treatment of [the] play is too self-consciously jolly and theatrical, too much of a Harlequinade and not enough of a social documentary . . . The cruelty is left out: most of the characters are too clean and golden-hearted’ (Richard Findlater, Tribune, 29 December 1950). Jonson, he continued, was ‘savagely satirical, a kind of boisterous misanthropist’, while ‘Mr Devine chose to prettify the play and neutralise its venom.’ Even so, there was enough in the production to inspire John Arden: ‘There was, in fact, the whole of London, shuffling and prowling about . . . and each of them, one way or another, as cracked as a old carrot . . . I determined, in short, that if I were to write social comedy, Jonson was the man to follow’ (1977, 32-3).

Various amateur and semi-professional productions which followed in the 1950s and 1960s are mentioned below and listed in Appendix 3. The next professional presentation, by the Bristol Old Vic Company at the Little Theatre, Bristol, from 30 August 1966, hardly made enough impact to be classed as a major production, and was not noticed in the national press. It sought a quaint immediacy by transferring the setting to Bristol in 1610, and turned the smallness of the auditorium to advantage, having ‘an open platform with the gangways used for many rip-roaring entrances and plenty of chasings’ (F. H. L., Bath Weekly Chronicle, 3 September 1966). The performance moved briskly, but also seems to have cultivated a deliberate superficiality, since F. H. L. adds: ‘The company cleverly skated with pace over some of the situations which might have embarrassed otherwise.’ As a result, commented ‘B. J.’ in the Bath and Wilts Evening Chronicle, ‘the play remains only a spectacle’ and ‘there are no real acting chances’ (31 August). The production clearly did not win over John Coe of the Bristol Evening Post to the play, for, while praising the leading performers, he thought the production had everything except ‘the hilarity the lines deny it. It is not as funny as the characters would have us believe,’ even though the play ‘has a boisterous earthiness of its own which is compelling’ (31 August).

When Bartholomew Fair returned to the professional stage in London, with a production by Terry Hands for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre late in 1969, it certainly did not fail to make its mark. Hands set out to provoke; the programme, for example, included this statement by D. A. N. Jones: ‘It has not been clear for some centuries whether Britain is a kingdom or a republic and we ought to mark the fact by setting up a Republican Jonson Theatre, to balance the Royal Shakespeare.’ (Ironically, just after the National Theatre had been authorised to add ‘Royal’ to its title in 1988, Richard Eyre, who had opposed the ‘royal Appelation’ and wondered ‘how do we avoid being tainted by it?’ (2003, 37), began his period there as artistic director with a very much less subversive production.) Reviews were numerous, often vehement, and very largely hostile. In a later discussion, Hands was to concede that his production was ‘disastrous’, but through under-rehearsal (Wardle, 1972, 7, 23), whereas it was his conception of the play that had usually been seen as the disaster. The assumption of most reviewers was that Bartholomew Fair is essentially a genial farce, for which words such as ‘rumbustious’ and ‘romp’ are fitting. Hands saw this as an obstacle to experiencing the play: ‘Where the problem comes is that there is a kind of revulsion at the moment towards a man who takes the eccentricity of the human being to the point where it ceases to be genial’ (ibid., 7).

Long-established reviewers looked back nostalgically to Devine’s production of nineteen years earlier. For example, J. C. Trewin, that devotee of the play, recalled Devine’s as a ‘mercifully . . . direct, uncomplicated revival with the right cuts’, whereas in Hands he found the play choked by having everything rammed in (Birmingham Post, 8 November). (Trewin was still taking the 1950 production as his touchstone when reviewing Peter Barnes’s production for the same paper on 3 June 1987.) To Frank Marcus, Hands was trying to see too much: ‘The production . . . is a dreadful mess — not due to carelessness or parsimony, but, on the contrary, due to over-elaboration and over-interpretation.’ He ‘crowds the stage with beggars, cripples, lepers, blind men, idiots, drunks, decaying whores, and tattered madmen — all looking like rejects from the Marat/Sade’ (Sunday Telegraph, 2 November). With two intervals, performances lasted almost three and a half hours, and, in such an intricate staging, this seemed too long.

The puppets, however, were unanimously adored. Here was an episode played for humour and charm, one that could be straightforwardly taken as ‘captivating’ (Hilary Spurling, Spectator, 8 November). Only one of the production’s very few reviews at once detailed and appreciative looked deeper and sensed that more was happening:

The best thing in the evening is the final puppet-show, with the cast crowding the stage in the deepening shadow of orange flares, their backs to the audience to listen to a Dionysus doll argue . . . the case for the theatre as a castigating image of its times. The play’s shapelessness suddenly is gathered up into a microcosm not merely of the pungent, teeming London of James I but of the whole history of comedy as a mirror of human folly through the ages. For a moment stage and auditorium become one, merging play and audience, in a universality not even Shakespeare’s comedies rival.

(Ronald Bryden, Observer, 2 November)

Apart from the puppets, however, preconceptions of geniality tended to arouse hostile reactions to this bleaker interpretation. As Frances Teague writes in response to a review by Roy Strong (Queen, 26 November), ‘the problem with this review and others like it is that Hands did succeed in presenting a new, and threatening, view of Jonson’s fair’ (1985, 128).

This is not to deny that there were grounds enough in this production for resisting it. Anachronisms such as ‘Would you would make me, baby’ (4.3.32) and ‘Alice is beating the bleeding daylights out of them’ (4.5.52-3) were inserted into the text. Anachronisms of costume and staging were yet more intrusive and pervasive. Costumes, for example, ranged from Jacobean to 1960s Carnaby Street. Busy wore a large puritan collar; Winwife and Quarlous were Regency bucks; John Littlewit wore an absurd quasi-legal outfit, with white collar over black tunic, and pin-stripe Bermuda shorts revealing his black, silk stockings. His wife Win was in elaborate eighteenth-century dress, while Grace was a smart lady of about 1900. As Mad Arthur, the Justice sported a pith helmet, long johns, and a vaguely oriental robe. Cokes wore apricot velvet, with knickerbockers. Ursula was a walking tent of rags; Mooncalf’s sacking emphasized the allusion to Caliban; Knockem looked like a pirate, but with huge hair; the Watch were Keystone Kops, but in crash helmets; Nightingale sang into a microphone, and a jazz group appeared.

As for the staging, Roy Strong thought it ‘more akin to the kind of camp-follower murk one associates with a production of Mother Courage than a Jacobean fair. Looking at it with its filthy tawdry old stalls and even more tatty occupants, who shelter beneath a perpetual midnight sky, . . . one wonders why anyone should ever have been longing to go there in the first place.’ The basic set was indeed drab, with ‘a few sucking pigs hanging in what looks like plastic indifference, a bit of uncertain colour on the chief knick-knack stall, funereal drapes, an atmosphere of the Aldwych stage, half-naked’ (R. B. M., Stage and Television Today, 6 November). In this murky background appeared an old car with crimson curtains as a travelling brothel, plus supermarket trolleys, a shooting stick, and so on. The exception was Leatherhead’s stand: ‘Timothy O’Brien has designed a gorgeous stall which explodes open like a firework, displaying colourful toys and trinkets’ (Marcus), although Sheila Bannock saw it as ‘a craftily devised polygonal contraption on wheels, with shutters which burst open rather as though they were the petals on an insectivorous plant which had inadvertently swallowed something nasty’ (Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 7 November). But, fortunately or not, this eye-catching device seems to have been opened and closed only three times.

Hands’s rationale for such an eclectic approach is implied in his later statement that Jonson was on the attack against his contemporary audience, and that it killed his drama to put him back in period setting and costume (Wardle, 1972, 28). The aim was, then, to strip away the comforting detachment of 350 years and enforce the timelessness of Jonson’s perception of vice and folly, as was perceived by D. A. N. Jones: ‘Hands suggests that Jonson’s comedy is eternal and universal, applicable to the London Sixties no more than to other scenes. Bartholomew Fair is the underworld, that hell’s kitchen on the underside of every society where all may let their hair down . . . For me, none of these anachronisms jar. They speed up the understanding (Listener, 6 November). Few were persuaded, however. Philip Hope-Wallace expressed the opposite view: ‘The fiercely satirised world of London low life in 1614 has its historical interest if played straight and securely’, whereas historical interest was abolished by the anachronisms (The Guardian, 31 October). For Marcus, the costuming emphasised not the timelessness of human traits but attached them arbitrarily to specific periods and circumstances. But perhaps a stronger argument against such eclecticism is that by striving for timelessness Hands achieved nothing but theatricality — the implausible melange of styles distracted the audience from the play to the presentation.

Nevertheless, the production was, in my view, much more successful and significant than most reviewers thought. It does seem to have suffered at first from under-rehearsal, as Hands acknowledged, since later reviewers were less critical. For Michael Anderson, who saw it towards the end of the run, ‘the fairground scenes were zestfully controlled pieces of ensemble playing’ (Plays and Players, January, 1970). It was presented by an extremely talented ensemble, led mainly by those, like Terry Hands himself, who had joined the company in or around 1966, notably Terrence Hardiman, Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Norman Rodway, Alan Howard, Sebastian Shaw, and Patrick Stewart, several of whom went on to major stardom. It was a great period for the company, and although this was not one of its classic productions, even after almost four decades I find much to recall with vivid pleasure. There was, for example, Norman Rodway (who was playing Mercutio, Edmund, and Thersites around that time) bringing precisely the right quizzical, or mordant, or challenging tones to the Quarlous of the earlier scenes, with caustic moral passion within the outrageous wit of his 1.3 speech against widow-hunting. Or there was the authoritarian fussiness of Sebastian Shaw as Justice Overdo, or gangling Alan Howard’s infectious enthusiasm and obtuse resilience as Cokes, or Patrick Stewart’s knowing sardonic bonhomie as Leatherhead, leading naturally to his triumph over the puritanical killjoy in 5.5. The production was unpopular mainly because it invited reviewers, perhaps too insistently and fussily, to look beyond their preconceptions and beneath the surface.

Major productions for some years to come were to take a less exacting and searching view of the play, and swung instead back towards ‘all the fun of the fair’. This is signalled in the pre-performance leaflet announcing the next, Richard Eyre’s production for Nottingham Players at the Playhouse in 1976: ‘Bartholomew Fair stands apart from Jonson’s other comedies in that it is happier and more extrovert in tone. It is a large-scale romp.’ He brought out this quality by emphasizing the fair within the Fair; authentic equipment from the Lady Bangor fairground collection housed at Wookey Hole, Somerset, was used, and the fair spread beyond the stage around the theatre. The foyer was crowded with fairground paraphernalia, and during the interval Captain Whit accosted innocent drinkers in the bar, offering them a choice of his two whores. Prophetically, Robin Thornber thought this — ‘which suggests how Bartholomew Fair might most appropriately be staged (or unstaged)’ — the most successful feature of the production (Guardian, 12 June 1976).

The on-stage set (designed by Pamela Howard) was economical and yet enchanting: the booths of Leatherhead and of Ursula were set obliquely on opposite sides of the stage, enclosing a triangular acting area. ‘Jaunty and angled, the arrangement suggested we were seeing a mere corner of the fair’s colourful corruption’ (Ned Chaillet, Plays and Players, September, 1976), with alleys of other booths stretching into the distance. The scene was enlivened by apt detail, such as Leatherhead’s ‘wonderful assortment of gimcrack toys’ (Jensen, 1976, 558) and a handsome merry-go-round pig outside Ursula’s, where characters could sit and gather. The intermittent use of a smoke machine enriched the atmosphere. The only criticism of this staging was that, despite the presence of a troupe of eleven fair-children, the stage often seemed under-populated, with little sense of the surrounding life of the fair (Irving Wardle, The Times, 12 June).

In keeping with the equipment from Wookey Hole, the production located the play firmly in the late Victorian period. The Littlewit household in Act 1 had a comfortable, bourgeois interior, with Win collapsing carefully onto a chaise longue. Costumes were to match. John appeared superficially as a balding solid citizen, a man of mature years, so it was the more telling when he not only admired Win’s dress of many frills and flounces but also kissed her large hat and even her shoes. Grace was very elegant in a white dress, with a parasol. Winwife and Quarlous ‘appeared as strutting Victorian subalterns with pill-box hats and waxed moustaches’ (G. K. Hunter, 1976, 85). Raffish and knowing, they wore dress uniforms, bright with buttons and white webbing, with a broad stripe down the trousers. Cokes, an engaging character with a sweet face and a trace of style about him, was an upper-class twit in boater and light-coloured suit. Edgworth, however, was very smart in a dark suit and bowler, with black gloves and tie, and a brilliant white shirt, complementing his gestures — in a virtuoso performance by Sylveste [Sylvester] McCoy — with grimaces reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Stan Laurel in silent films. Apart from this ambiguous figure, class distinctions were clearly observed. Knockem, for example, was a horse-racing tipster, with ticket in hatband, embroidered waistcoat, and loud check trousers.

In keeping with the picturesque setting, this was predominantly a good-natured romp. There was certainly grossness at the fair, especially in the figure of Ursula, whom Ejner Jensen described as ‘played here by a male [Arthur Kohn], who spat, sweated, and almost visibly stank his way through the impersonation’, but Chaillet found this a ‘rich foulness’, while Jensen himself saw it as part of the production’s ‘buoyant energy and uninhibited grossness’. The presence of members of the Ken Campbell Road Show in the cast — led by Campbell himself as Knockem — ensured that the performers were ‘masters of bawdy’, with ‘the gift of ensemble playing . . . The world of cutpurses, whores, pimps and drunkards becomes attractive through its comic good humour’ (Chaillet).

The presentation of Grace is often a touchstone: her desperate situation but icy demeanour make her problematic for genial productions. As portrayed here, in her elegant dress, she might have been appearing in The Importance of Being Earnest; photographs show Celia Foxe in the role as captivatingly pretty and intelligent, sweetly smiling as she perches on Ursula’s pig and chats with the two subalterns. Typically, the frigid words of Winwife and herself at 5.2.26-31 when they confirm their arrangement to marry were here edited down to simple affirmations. Another touchstone is the treatment of John once he realizes that the ‘green madam’ is actually his wife; here he initially squatted sadly on a bench behind her, but soon moved beside her and then took her hand in reconciliation. The prevailingly sunny production was epitomised by the sight of Knockem, Punk Alice, and one of the children of the fair all sitting companionably on Ursula’s pig during the last scene, enjoying the fun together.

Some reviewers were conscious of this as a simplification. For Rosalind Miles, the production was best for newcomers to Jonson, because ‘the resultant humour and good will tended to disguise the fact that the more problematical areas of the drama were somewhat sketchily handled’ (cited T. Howard, 1978, 63). For George Hunter, ‘the balance between game and danger, which the play requires, was preserved, though perhaps with more emphasis on game than in the ideal production I imagine.’ Ned Chaillet took an either/or view: for him, this was a visually exciting production that ‘captures much of the irresistible vulgarity of the fairground,’ whereas it is literary critics who tend to stress Jonson’s ironical posture. ‘Producers can’t have it both ways, however, and have to opt for seduction or irony.’ In those terms, Eyre certainly chose to seduce the audience. But are directors faced with so absolute an either/or?

When Bartholomew Fair returned to the professional London stage in the summer of 1978, the process of turning the Fair into a fair went much further, and not once but twice, because there were overlapping runs for two festive productions with much in common. Michael Bogdanov introduced his term as director of a new company at the Young Vic Theatre with the play, while Thelma Holt, the new artistic and executive director of the Round House — a former actress at the beginning of her distinguished career as a theatrical producer — mounted the theatre’s first in-house production for a decade with a version directed by the playwright and ardent Jonsonian, Peter Barnes.

Bogdanov rooted his performance in the conviction that the major theatrical companies had been unadventurous because too cerebral, and he sought to merge the intellectual and the physical. Symbolically, Jonson’s induction was replaced by the actor who was to play Leatherhead ripping pages out of an edition of the play. Moreover, as an inaugural production, he wanted his company to show off a wide range of theatrical skills: the cast not only wrote and performed the show’s rock music, but was also trained in gymnastics and circus techniques — clowning, juggling, acrobatics, tight-rope-walking, riding unicycles, etc. Bogdanov had the theatre become a fair, although a fair rather like a circus. Action spilt all over the building, into the corridors and foyers and out into the street. It began with an actor tearing a telephone directory in half in the pub next door. The cast told jokes and danced with members of the audience. Strips of cloth stretched from the ceiling to the sides of the house to create a sense of being in a circus tent. Apples and gingerbread flew about. There was a live pig on stage — on opening night it ran wild and took a Punch-and-Judy booth with it. The brawls were brilliantly handled.

The programme encouraged historical awareness: there were several pages on the history of the play and of the actual fair. But the performance sought immediacy: dress was modern (Nightingale was a pop star, in bangles and satin) and the text was updated. Even Grace seems to have become ‘a scheming intruder with a modern sexual appetite’ — an unorthodox approach found also at the Round House a few weeks later, where Jennie Stoller ‘blossoms effectively into a lascivious opportunist’ (Michael Coveney, Financial Times, 23 June and 4 August).

All this fun of the fair was both admired and deplored, and most reviews can be summed up in John Barber’s words: ‘Unhappily, only the inessentials are enjoyable . . . This is 1960s directors’ theatre, galloping slapstick and wild invention which leaves the significance of the play untouched’ (Daily Telegraph, 24 June). Michael Billington added: ‘I feared the worst when I entered the theatre to find tattered whores accosting one in the doorway and actors arm-wrestling on stage with members of the audience: Billington’s Law states that the more fun there is in the foyer, the less there is to be had from the production. And, sure enough, Bogdanov’s attempt to put the play into modern dress makes very little sense’ (The Guardian, 23 June).

This is not to deny Bogdanov’s awareness of the play’s elusiveness. The narrative was clarified by concentrating on the misadventures of Justice Overdo, while Heather Neill cites the director as saying: ‘There is a thin line between the comedy and blackness. The play takes apart the pretentiousness of the merchant class mercilessly’ (TES, 23 June). But critics such as Ned Chaillet found ‘a frenetic incoherence’. He went on: ‘It is pleasant to have unicycles weaving throughout the action, admirable that the fights are so nicely athletic, and the performances are generally enjoyable. But, having suggested a total theatricality that expands beyond the text, his dogmatic returns to Jonson seem merely dutiful. The circus skills are only a dressing for a classic, instead of a new way of seeing it’ (The Times, 23 June).

This meant that the central challenges of presenting the play were not faced, as Gillian Reynolds realised: ‘One of the problems of doing Jonson for a modern audience . . . is that we’re no longer used to such savage comedy, such denseness of plot, so many totally unsympathetic characters. We are more sentimental in our neo-realism these days . . . Directors who try to romp it up, to throw in all manner of tawdry tricks . . . always come a cropper’ (Plays and Players, August 1978). For Chaillet, this was another comfortable, genial production: ‘The softness of the moral edges through the production is a disadvantage . . . [Bogdanov] has not merged the boisterous friendliness of his style to the play’s content.’

Tony Howard’s view was different: ‘Bogdanov made the final scene the play’s true climax. His fairground people showed a keen eye for the hypocrisy of the rest . . . The exposures . . . were sordid and humiliating, culminating in the destruction of Overdo’s claims to moral superiority. His invitation to the others was a pathetic appeal for respect. Law had failed and the play ended with a sudden blackout and a spotlight on the puppet MC, laughing at mankind’ (1978, 64). But the consensus, summed up in the Punch review, was that the satiric force of Jonson’s play appeared too late; by the time the audience was told this might be a serious and bitter piece about the moralities of London life, the frolics and the relentless, romping joviality had taken too firm a hold (5 July).

Thelma Holt conceived Bartholomew Fair as a Round House initiative partly because it had been selected by the University of London Board as an A-Level text but primarily because of the venue, a vast and breathtaking locomotive shed. As the house Newsletter said in August 1978: ‘Staging Bartholomew Fair in the Round House is for once a perfect matching of play and venue. There can be few other playhouses in the world which will accommodate the special epic vitality of the piece as well as the Round House. It has been waiting 300 years to find such a magnificent setting.’

Consequently, Peter Barnes and his designers, Robin Don and Tanya McCallin, transformed the whole of the building’s cavernous interior — including the gallery, forecourt, and periphery — into a gigantic fairground. The seating was removed from the main arena, and the audience perched on wooden benches around a large and intricate section of the fair, with various substantial, two-storey structures (including a helter-skelter). Again, fairground equipment was borrowed from Lady Bangor’s collection, though with the aim of approximating to a seventeenth rather than nineteenth-century fair. Costumes were, therefore, of the period, most of them looking lived in rather than picturesque.

The acting area was approached and encompassed by a busy and effervescent fair, which opened three-quarters of an hour before the performance began and continued throughout. Aptly redolent of the ‘dirty’ and ‘stinking’ Smithfield of Jonson’s induction, there was, as Irving Wardle noted, ‘a pungent odour of pig’ on entering the shed (The Times, 4 August), and for 50p members of the audience could have their fortune ‘told’ by these trained pigs from Blackpool Tower Circus. Between the pillars supporting the circular roof there was a series of stalls, offering food and drink, sideshows, games with prizes, and amusements. ‘William Shakespeare’ was to be spotted, wandering around with a whore. There was a menagerie of curious animals, with several donkeys (the scene stolen by the foal ‘Bartholomew’ born in there just before opening night), a cockerel and several hens, numerous mice, a Shetland stallion, geese, etc. There were strolling minstrels and morris-dancers, and Colin Delaware of Westminster Morris Men wrote on 23 July to confirm that ‘eight men plus our very own live unicorn will be in attendance’ on the opening night. Production papers detail the enormous resources of herbs, spices, mustards, and much besides bought in for the stalls, while, on stage, for Leatherhead’s stall alone, there were twenty apiece of hobbyhorses, tin drums, marionettes, rag dolls, wooden toy animals, wooden rattles, halberds, fiddles, and trumpets.

Many found it great fun. ‘None of this looks self-conscious’, wrote Wardle, who thought ‘the Round House . . . a god-given location for this theatre-resistant masterpiece’. Despite Nottingham in 1976 and the Young Vic only a few weeks earlier, it seemed to him the first time he had really seen the play. It drove home ‘the folly of anyone having power over anyone else’.

The other reviewers, however, were less enchanted, and ‘Billington’s Law’ still applied. As Billington himself wrote, ‘the building is busy, alive and colourful, but the actual production that follows . . . has a stolid, generalised jollity and all too little sense of audience-involvement . . . Barnes, having involved you in a communal experience before the play starts, then proceeds to shut you out.’ Only Peter Bayliss as Overdo (whose performance was universally praised) was in touch with the audience and did not seem to be working away behind plate glass (The Guardian, 4 August). Having evoked the setting, Michael Coveney added: ‘Then the play begins, and I am afraid that all this wrap-around build-up is jettisoned for a straightforward and not terribly inspired production.’ By settling for story-telling rather than exciting visual presentation, Barnes failed to cope with the play’s major difficulty, and ‘you feel a great opportunity has gone begging’ (Financial Times, 4 August). Jane Ellison added: ‘Robin Don’s enormous set dwarfed the players, and the Fair itself is an empty, echoing wasteland . . . Jonson’s wit falls emptily on the air’ (Evening Standard, 4 August).

Again the production was limited by a lack of moral definition, as Gillian Reynolds saw most pointedly: ‘And a nice night they made of it. A nice, clean, safe, bright, sweet Jacobean panto, which I don’t think is what the play is about but which makes quite a jolly evening.’ Much was inaudible, but that hardly mattered because the characters had been ironed out into niceness, with ‘no savage satirical creasings here, no menace, no sense of sin’ (Plays and Players, October 1978). Even for Wardle, the production’s greatest admirer, the show ‘dispenses nothing but playful affection towards the thieves, fools, and mountebanks, and reserves its gentle reprisals only for those who presume to positions of judgement and authority.’ There was a price to be paid for all this benevolence: ‘In Michael Bogdanov’s Young Vic version, the lady vomited copiously at this moment [the 5.6 climax], and Overdo crumpled into humiliated defeat . . . On Mr Barnes’s stage, the moment passes without any ugliness, and the main point is that Overdo is asking everyone home to dinner instead of locking them up.’ The straightforward tone is suggested by Michael Gearin-Tosh’s production notes, which record that in rehearsal Peter Bayliss said he would not merely be ‘patient’ at his defeat by Quarlous (5.6.87) but was ‘going to laugh and laugh’. ‘Wonderful’, replied Barnes, and had the others join in.

Bartholomew Fair is a play that challenges directors to tackle it more than once. The major professional productions of the 1980s were directed by Peter Barnes and Richard Eyre, as two major productions of the 1970s had been. In the event, however, any changes came more from theatrical settings and opportunities than from a new vision of the play. For Ian Talbot’s inaugural production as artistic and managing director of the New Shakespeare Company in Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 1987, Peter Barnes presented essentially his Round House conception of the play, but adapted for the demands of outdoor performance.

The text was again cut down to essentials; linguistic cadenzas and complex speeches were gutted, although new songs were inserted. It was again a cheerful production setting the Fair within a fair. The auditorium was surrounded by entertainments such as fire-eating, tight-rope walking, juggling, tumbling, morris-dancing, fortune-telling, Punch and Judy, and a menagerie. Roast pork and old-style preserves were for sale. This, at least, is the prevailing recollection, though for Jeremy Kingston: ‘The promised sideshows around the periphery of the theatre turn out to be little more than a gentle juggler and a rabbit in its run’ (The Times, 2 June).

The play was again done in period (apart from the ugly, life-sized puppets, with bulbous, cretinous heads, which, for once, made the episode unpopular). Three half-timbered clapboard houses dominated the set, opening up to reveal the gaudy fair booths. John Walsh found it ‘a stage set of flexible simplicity, busily peopled with jugglers, fire-eaters, hobbyhorse dealers and strumpets’ (London Evening Standard, 3 June), though Nicholas de Jongh thought it ‘awkward and ugly’ (The Guardian, 3 June) and Simon Trussler found that the ‘neat grouping . . . with two of the stalls rather depressingly closed, didn’t quite reflect the prevailing chaos’ (Plays and Players, August 1987). Again, the set seemed too large for the production: ‘Hampered by the wide, deep stage that leaves aching gaps between the timbered booths, the company shrink into small isolated groups’ (Jeremy Kingston).

Individual interpretations also recalled the earlier production. Again, Grace ‘blossoms magnificently from glacial snob into voracious sex-pot’ (John Walsh). According to Trussler, her ‘barely corseted sexuality’ persuades ‘us that she detests her intended less for his buffoonery than his likely ineptitude in bed’. Peter Bayliss, who had been so appreciated in 1978 (and who had supported Barnes through a difficult period in rehearsal) returned as Overdo to give essentially the same performance, though now he extended beyond echoes of Frankie Howerd into booming out a Goon Show variety of funny voices. The least welcome novelty was giving Overdo an ill-conceived lust after a dishy young Edgworth.

This was a production based not only on Overdo but also on Ursula, played by the 71-year-old but charismatic Peggy Mount as ‘predictably gorgeous, as she totters laboriously to her plump feet, large in pathos as well as abuse’ (de Jongh). This was the ‘one outstanding, unmistakably Jonsonian success . . . She makes us listen, relishing the invective’ (Jim Hiley, Listener, 11 June). Christopher Ryan was also a hit as Troubleall: ‘Bearded and twitching, he resembles a cross between a neurotic goat and an inquisitive bird’ (Nick St George, BBC Radio London, 6 June).

As for the production as a whole, it was praised later by Richard Cave in a compressed survey of recent performances for ‘tremendous vigour . . . matched with considerable scruple, most notably in the careful orchestration of the acts and the attention paid to the time-scale of the play’ (1991, 175). But at the time reviews were critical: ‘Something has . . . gone very wrong on the park’s open, grassy stage and it is, I think, that the company gradually lose all faith in their director’s enthusiasm for the play . . . You could see performances perceptibly broadening into desperate farce to win laughs’ (International Herald Tribune, 10 June, and Punch, 11 June). Several complained with de Jongh that Barnes ‘has coarsened and thickened the texture of Jonson’s supple comedy. Jonson may hint at urination — Barnes revels in chamber-pots, vomit and farts as if the mere sight or mention is comic.’ Hiley added: ‘The whole thing gets the familiar nudge-nudge treatment, prompting the question, if they aren’t taking the play seriously, why should we?’

It follows that again Jonson’s elusive comedy was simplified into elementary farce. Indeed, the term ‘pantomime’ used by Gillian Reynolds of the Round House is used disparagingly in at least six reviews, for example: ‘There are easy gestures of circus-like jollity, as well as interpolations and importunings for us to behave like a pantomime or nineteenth-century audience’ (de Jongh); ‘Familiarity seems to have bred a certain contempt in Mr Barnes. He . . . turns farce into pantomime’ (Jack Tinker, Daily Mail, 5 June); ‘Trampling satirical ironies underfoot in performances more suited to pantomime, . . . [the actors] take the low comedy down a few notches’ (Kenneth Hurren, Mail on Sunday, 7 June); Bayliss ‘appears to be a refugee from some rather seedy panto’ (St George).

In sum, although it was an enjoyable and undemanding evening out when the weather was fine, the performance was ‘like a community theatre version, but shorn of any cutting edge’ (John Connor, City Limits, 11 June).

This Regent’s Park performance followed on from the Round House; Richard Eyre’s inaugural production as artistic director of the Royal National Theatre in the autumn of 1988 adapted his conception of the play at Nottingham twelve years earlier to the vast resources of the Olivier Theatre. Eyre had reservations about this: ‘I’m doing this play just because the giant mouth of the Olivier Theatre wants to close its jaws on it, and because I can’t find a large-scale comedy and none of the directors I’ve approached wants the Olivier. I’m doing a re-tread without the daring and excitement of the production I did at Nottingham. I’m doing the things I swore I wouldn’t do. It’s a terrible note to start on’. His feelings about the production were to be volatile; a month into rehearsals he noted: ‘Rehearsals for Bartholomew Fair have been fun this week, and my spirits soar’, while on opening: ‘Comedy is more risky than anything, and classic comedy the riskiest of all, and this production doesn’t deliver. My fault’ (Eyre, 2003, 46, 50-51).

With elaborate staging, a cast of thirty-three actors and five children, and with twice as much rehearsal as normal in the professional theatre, this was the play’s most lavish production of the twentieth century, and probably ever. It was also the culmination of a series of productions that did not set a fair within the play but the play within a fair. While Eyre did not seek to re-create the atmosphere of a fair throughout the whole theatre and even outside — as he had done in part at Nottingham and as Bogdanov and Barnes had done more thoroughly — he now set the main body of the action not in a corner of the fair, between two booths, but in the fair as a whole. Even so, this expansive production, which lasted three and a quarter hours, began with a sense of enclosure. The induction was played in front of a curtain, near a title-board taken from an anonymous pamphlet of 1641, Bartholomew Fair, or Variety of Fancies. For Act 1 the curtain opened to reveal, anachronistically, a cramped late Victorian parlour isolated on a small raised platform, with enough button armchairs, flowers in the hearth, bric-à-brac on the mantelpiece, and swags and flounces above to make the Pooter family feel at home. But, in the words of Richard Cave (THES, 9 December 1988): ‘It is a wonderfully uplifting moment . . . when we escape the confines of the Littlewits’ parlour . . . and suddenly glimpse the whole panorama of the fair, a great expanse of colour, movement, sound. We enter a child’s paradise where adults shed their gravity, inhibitions and, in some cases, their clothes to become young again, unselfconscious, abandoned, and naughty.’

Eyre and his designer William Dudley — an admirer of intricate, late Victorian staging — made this set not the milieu but the focus of the production. Until that year, the Olivier revolve had lain unused beneath the main stage, and Dudley had been the first designer to exploit it. Now it was raised again to permit captivating changes of scene. The ‘fair engulfs the stage with sparkling big wheels, a giant steam organ, and booths overflowing with shiny trinkets’ (Irving Wardle, The Times, 22 October). Three Ferris wheels whirled in the air as the organ thundered, or suddenly and magically settled on the stage as roundabouts and ornately decorated booths, and they continued to move in several permutations throughout the evening. Ursula’s booth (again with a merry-go-round pig in front as a gathering point) was the most permanent, and billowed with smoke all evening. The various tents and booths included ‘The Menagerie’: lions roared angrily whenever anyone entered. The vast backdrop, one of the largest painted for the National Theatre, gave a permanent vista of an extended fair, with a helter-skelter in the middle. Garish but enchanting, ‘painted like the treats of our childhood, [the booths] instantly evoke the world of illicit pleasure and escape you can still just about enjoy twice a year on Hampstead Heath’ (Michael Coveney, Financial Times, 22 October).

Dudley’s costume designs — ‘hilarious images . . . grotesque, yet never cruel’ (Cave) — maintained the handsomeness of the production. Cokes was extremely tall and gangling, an upper-class idiot carrying a switch and wearing a boater and loud check suit, plus-fours and spats, with prominent bow-tie and cuffs, and a starched collar. Wasp, in contrast, a very angry and affronted turkey-cock, wore dark jacket, bright striped waistcoat, pinstripe trousers, and a tall hat. John Littlewit ‘comes on finally adorned with Wilde’s green carnation and Bunthorne jacket, in his capacity as author of the puppet play’ (Peter Porter, TLS, 4 November). As Mad Arthur, the Justice wore a leather smock bearing the legend: ‘Less eggs, fish, meat & tea ="less" lust’, echoing an eccentric who was then to be seen around Oxford Circus. As a porter in Act 5, he came on bearing a column of large wicker baskets on his head, as tall as himself. Knockem was a spiv in a lilac suit, while Edgworth was smart in a dark suit, with buttonhole. As at Nottingham, Grace was lovely in white, with an elegant parasol, while again Winwife and Quarlous were smartly dressed soldiers, redcoats cynical and aloof with their pill-box hats and swagger sticks.

The sumptuous inventiveness and beauty mean that the production lives still in the visual memory of those of us who saw it. But this was always problematic. In a broadcast discussion, for example, John Elsom thought the production a glamorous, entertaining failure (BBC Radio 3 Critics’ Forum, 12 November). What, especially, was the dramatic relevance of all the spectacle? As Michael Coveney put it: ‘The stage action rarely matches the relish and expectation aroused by the text. If you go for one tumultuous side show, you lose the texture and detail of the characters.’ He added, however, ‘but this glorious production . . . goes the furthest in my experience towards solving this problem.’ For Martin Esslin, the setting underlined the enduring Englishness of the play by bringing Dickens to mind; it was an apt metaphor for the sensuality and bawdiness of popular culture in the national character, in permanent conflict with puritanism, gentility, and repression (Plays International, December-January 1988-89). From this perspective it was apt to have Busy mimic the Ulster politician, the Rev. Ian Paisley.

Others felt that the huge stage and panoramic action (rather than the focused set envisaged by the text, as analysed in the first section of this history) were out of step with the play. As David Nathan wrote: ‘The great delight and the great drawback . . . is William Dudley’s Victorian fairground design, for though it propels the production while it is in bustling action, it draws attention to its unnatural stillness when it stops to let the play proceed’ (Jewish Chronicle, 4 November). Many shared this reaction, such as Anne Donaldson: ‘Steam-organ music blares out, all the boisterous fun of the fair — but there’s the rub. If the noise continues, not a word of the intricate text can be heard. Cut it out, and the fair goes dead’ (Glasgow Herald, 26 October). The more elaborate the mise en scène, the more danger of the background either lying ‘pest’lence dead’ or of dominating the foreground action. According to Michael Ratcliffe, ‘only in the final knees-up does the large company take possession of the great arena stage for the first time. It springs to life’ (Observer, 23 October). But at least, as Richard Cave pointed out, all the machinery of the fair did at least force the main action onto the forestage, closer to the audience.

The fair machinery required Jonson’s highly specific text to be set at least 250 years out of period. For some, this seemed a crucial error: ‘Given the play’s Jacobean documentary vivacity, it seems pointless to transpose it to Victorian times . . . Laughter is slow to come because the fun seems rootless’ (Michael Billington, The Guardian, 22 October). For Jack Tinker, the fun of the fair was missing as the staging failed to capture Jonson’s essential anarchy: ‘Perhaps it is the transposition to a Victorian setting which puts unaccustomed corsets on the play’s fleshy delights,’ because Jonson was more a Chaucer or Hogarth than a Victorian satirist (Daily Mail, 27 October). But others would have agreed with Martin Esslin, cited above. Peter Porter, for example, says: ‘The same colourful bustle of orgy and abstinence exemplifies both periods, with the Victorian far easier to respond to for a modern audience.’

The trouble with this view is that the ‘bustle of orgy’ was in short supply. For Paul Taylor, the play was a depressing experience because there was no reek of the human: the polished revolves were so clean you could have eaten your dinner off them. ‘The anti-puritan satire fails to take off because we are never given a vivid sense of the vortex which sucks these people up, and rudely separates them from their dignity’ (Independent, 22 October). Similarly, for Christopher Edwards (even in a most appreciative review): ‘Despite the references to roast pork, sweat and overflowing chamber-pots, the piece turns out polished and wearing its Sunday best. The director has given it a most unJonsonian tidiness’ (Spectator, 29 October).

Once again, a production that saw the play as unequivocally genial succeeded in making it hygienic and safe. Consequently — and despite much praise for the leading actors — several reviewers commented on the lifelessness of the occasion and the fitful responsiveness of the audience: ‘I’ve never seen so many solemn faces gather for such a supposedly jolly caper’ (Alex Renton, Illustrated London News, December 1988). There were obvious ploys to gain laughter: ‘It is typical of the heavy jokiness that David Burke’s otherwise excellent puritan busybody is finally revealed to be wearing pink frilly drawers: Jonson was attacking monomaniac zealotry, not sexual aberration’ (Billington).

Even so, critical responses were unusually diverse. While Sheridan Morley thought ‘the cast seem as depressed as their audience by the overall tedium of proceedings’ (Punch, 4 November), David Nathan felt: ‘The company clearly relish playing the whores, bully-boys, conmen, punters and pimps that make up this rumbustious slice of old England.’ In particular, the cast’s speaking of Jonson’s dense and rich language came in for unusual mention: ‘For once a production has got on top of Jonson’s language instead of being buried under it’ (Irving Wardle). John Peter thought it ‘a cast of remarkable Jonsonians. A Jonsonian is an actor who can savour this language . . . as if it were highly flavoured food, or attack it as if it were a rival predatory animal.’ As a result, ‘the whole thing is turbulently and vigorously alive; it’s a treat’ (Sunday Times, 15 October). The quality of the acting was caught by Richard Cave, with an inwardness that came from having seen the production several times:

Particularly notable is Jonathan Cullen as a whey-faced, Chaplinesque Ezekiel, a truly gentlemanly cutpurse with his nice, cultivated voice and elegantly tapering fingers (now like poised fans, now darting for pockets like birds after prey) . . . Watch how in the fight-sequences when someone gets rapped on the knuckles, his hands instantly flex out to make sure his own members are intact. His agile hands are his livelihood and his whole sensibility is centred in them.

He concludes:

This is the kind of detailed playing Jonson demands; and Eyre paces his production to let such details tell without disrupting the onward-sweeping dynamic of the action. In consequence he has inspired some ensemble acting of a very high order: one feels in the presence of a truly social comedy.

(THES, 9 December 1988)

The next major production was by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, from December 1997, revived at the Young Vic Theatre, London, from February 1999. Again the director was someone with a long commitment to the play, since Laurence Boswell had been praised for his performance as Quarlous in a youth production at Coventry in 1979, and three years later had directed a production by a student group. In 1997, the outcome was the most radical realization of the play on the twentieth-century stage, a reaction against the line of recent productions that had culminated in the National Theatre extravaganza of 1988. Where that had been in the huge Olivier, this was in the RSC’s smaller theatre, with the audience sitting on three sides of a thrust stage; where the Olivier staging was lavishly picturesque, the Swan’s was harshly minimalist; where the mood at the Olivier was genial and warm-hearted, the Swan production exposed the darker implications of the text, more even than the previous RSC production of 1969.

Boswell’s fundamental move was to set the play in recent times: the later acts were more reminiscent of that other August festivity, the Notting Hill Carnival, than of any traditional fair. From the reggae songs and other amplified pop music to the baseball caps and trainers, tracksuits, Newcastle United shirts and designer shades, this was 1990s street life. But realism was not the aim, since ‘there an element of caricature about Tom Piper’s witty costumes that suits the play’s tart humour well’ (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 15 December 1997), and there were also elements of the ‘swinging sixties’, such as a Mary Quant outfit for Win, a fruit machine, espresso coffee, and, in Quarlous, a recollection of John Lennon. In the words of Sarah Hemming, ‘Tom Piper’s suitably gaudy design also keeps [the fair] abstract, suggesting that the trip to the fair is partly symbolic, a walk on the wild side of life that proves a rite of passage for those involved’ (Financial Times, 2 March 1999).

The opening act, however, was very different from this, and (since reviewers concentrated on the carnival scenes) remains one of the performance’s unsung triumphs. Productions that see Bartholomew Fair as the re-creation of a fair tend not to dwell on Act 1. But Boswell had grasped that the fair is no more than a setting and that the play is primarily about the condescending visitors from the middle-class world established in the first seven scenes. That world was fully realized in performance, even though visually it was only hinted at in Act 1 by a hostess trolley, by L-shaped seats at the stage corners, and by a large white curtain also draped along the stage as a carpet. The text was less cut than usual (at three and a half hours this was the longest version since the Edinburgh Festival in 1950); the pace felt poised and unhurried, and each character was meticulously caught. The tone was set by Stephen Boxer’s definitive John Littlewit, endearingly silly and almost but not quite stylish, even rakish, in his crumpled cream linen suit and bow-tie, doddering through his opening conceits yet almost amused at himself for being amused at such ‘carwitchets’, and enjoying a playful though childish and mawkish intimacy with his wife. ‘This was no caricature pedant, but a man whose follies were lightly born’ (Greg Walker, CahiersÉ, 54, 1998, 121). Win, ludicrous in a yellow dress and a hat with a swirly serpentine piece on top, teetering on very high ‘Spice Girl-style wedges’ (Sarah Hemming), visibly pregnant and clutching a tub of Haagen-Daz, seemed a shy and nervous person jerked up into a higher posture and prominence than she wanted or could maintain. On entry, however, Cokes was an over-confident simpleton. This was the Cokes who even in Act 5 can address Leatherhead as ‘fellow’ and calls himself and is called a ‘gallant’, an upper-class twit with a relaxed and insolent surface of arrogant poise, and with a preposterous hint of rakishness about his orange suit.

Genial productions have little alternative but to idealize Winwife and his ‘gamester’ friend Quarlous, but not here. Winwife was a snooty Indian gent with slicked back hair, a boldly patterned hacking jacket, shiny spotted waistcoat, dark blue shirt, and red silk tie. As the play progressed, he ‘simply got smarmier and smarmier’ (Schafer, 1998, 68). Quarlous — the part that Boswell himself had played with success — was the key figure of the play, someone of wit, intelligence, and moral passion in self-destructive decline. This was, in the words of Greg Walker, ‘a gamester in a recognisably modern idiom. In long leather coat, superannuated rock-star stubble, and John Lennon sunglasses, his rueful observations on the previous night’s excesses, tentatively offered from under heavy eyelids and through a splitting headache, were entirely plausible.’ There was an air of louche and dishevelled stylishness turning into menace, but he still had passion enough to show real anger at Winwife’s widow-hunting, though any risk of appearing vulnerably high-minded about such loveless copulation was countered by his graphically obscene gestures. With interpretations like these, Act 1 became an enticing entry into multiple possibilities, instead of being a mere exposition to be got through, and the audiences were very responsive, both when I saw the play live and on the video of the production in the Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford.

The later acts brought no attempt to re-create the fun of the fair, or even a sense of its brisk trade. From time to time, Leatherhead would pop up from the centre-stage trap, revealing masses of toys, dolls, and other kitsch of the fair on the turned back leaves of the trapdoor. At such times, numerous gewgaws of the fair — birdcages, puppets, and baubles — hung above him from the roof. But much of the time the staging was dark and simple: the back wall was painted midnight blue, there would be a plastic table and a few chairs on stage to represent the public front of Ursula’s booth, and the only suggestion of a fair came from long ropes of bare tangerine light-bulbs hanging as a swirling mesh curtain, a division between forestage and rear when at rest, but at times swinging out to suggest a carousel and other fairground treats. At first, once Leatherhead appeared, there was (as Richard Cave recalls) enough to hint at fairground appeal: ‘When first seen it conveyed all the magic of a child’s delight in such occasions, exactly in tune with Cokes’s response; later as night fell, the lights cast lurid and threatening shadows about the theatre as adult desires began to reveal a darker, sullied heart to that seeming innocence’ (Cave et al, 1999, 54).

Pop music pounded, lights flashed, whistles blew. Pills were popped at the edge of the stage. It all gave ‘a dizzy, hallucinatory feel to proceedings. The atmosphere of sweaty temptation, beery pleasure, and simmering violence is wonderfully conjured’ (Sarah Hemming). There was ‘a surface glitter of manic activity and glamorous chic, beneath which is a sordid catch-as-catch-can world . . . a menacing, cavernous world’ (Viv Thomas, Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 12 December 1997).

This was a fair without camaraderie, and relationships were purely instrumental. Mooncalf was a Johnny Rotten punk, Nightingale a heavily built ‘Yardie’ in a loud check suit and black cap, with electric guitar. Knockem and Whit, Ursula’s ‘smiling-sinister acolytes, masters in the arts of perversion, are not acted but lived . . . They positively reek of amoral nastiness — a smell that clings, too, to the cutpurse’ (Viv Thomas). A thoroughly mad Troubleall ‘roamed the stage with a low loping gait in search of the chimerical "warrant”, engaging the audience with fish-bowl eyes from behind rimless spectacles’ (Greg Walker). He was shirtless under his rusty dark suit and bowler, and was never without an old suitcase, which was never opened — perhaps this was where he would have put the ‘warrant of warrants’, a symbol of hope as hopeless as the Caretaker’s stash of papers at Sidcup.

All this evokes the Fair as a setting, and complicated rather than cancelled the laughter aroused by the escapades of the middle-class visitors. For many, the high point of the production was Nightingale’s ‘Caveat’ in 3.5, when Tom Goodman-Hill as Cokes, high on cannabis, became Edgworth’s dupe again while attempting a carnival dance with his hands in his pockets: ‘He manages to turn a dance into a vivid character-sketch: embarrassing, uninhibited; eager to prove himself, he wiggles his bottom, swivels his heels, and lets out the little yelps of a would-be groover’ (Susannah Clapp, Observer, 14 December 1997). But, as Katherine Duncan-Jones wrote: ‘There can be few evenings in the theatre in which so much laughter . . . is accompanied by so little pleasure. Even the jolly rock music . . . compels us to respond to its pounding rhythms only with a feeling of sick anxiety’ (TLS, 26 December 1997). ‘It is like spending the evening at a too loud, too bright shopping extravaganza in a mirror-lined mall. Though there are no mirrors in a literal sense, what we encounter here are disturbingly accurate and unflattering images of ourselves, consumers and pleasure-seekers of all sorts, all foolish enough to relinquish domestic responsibilities and quietude for the sake of three hours of tawdry and expensive folly.’ Unless, that is, the audience is observing rather than participating, and this is surely what Boswell’s critical mode aimed to encourage.

This is not to deny that the production had its vulnerable features. The stage was often surprisingly empty — when the pears were spilt in 4.2, the ‘muss’ consisted of Cokes all by himself, without one rival or casual onlooker. Even the ‘vapours’ of 4.4 never had more than a few drunkards scattered across the stage. The rather empty, and frequently emptied, stage did not do justice to Jonson’s liaison des scènes and made the play seem episodic rather than flowing, even within the individual acts. And inevitably, so relentlessly modernized a setting cannot do justice to the whole text. As Michael Billington objected, ‘the insoluble problem is the defiantly Jacobean nature of Jonson’s world . . . in which puritanism was a potent force.’ In 5.5, Jonson was making ‘a seriously prophetic point about religious antipathy to the very idea of drama, one that has no exact equivalent today’, and one bound to be lost when Busy appeared so marginal a figure (The Guardian, 13 December 1997).

But overall this was the most searching production of modern times, justified especially by the impressive final scene. This was initially given more weight than usual by Overdo’s emerging as almost convincingly authoritative and dignified, even though he revealed his judicial robes beneath his disguise of workman’s overalls and then put on a long judge’s wig. More significantly, the text’s audaciously uncomic moments of pain were not glossed over, as in most productions, by the bonhomie of a comic ending. John reacted with joy when told his lost wife was present after all and stepped towards her, but once he realized what had happened he slumped away from her onto the chair where earlier she had been sitting to watch the show, and he stayed there alone, crushed. The revelation of Mrs Overdo’s identity was similarly potent: she, too, had been sitting in an isolated chair and she was left all alone as the arraignment began. Suddenly she rose, reeled around, and, in mid-stage, a little in front of her husband, she turned, faced the audience, vomited, and fell to the floor. Deeply shamed and hurt, she had a real fear that she would not be able to see her Adam again. There was a long, long silence from Adam, until Quarlous took over. When Quarlous, insolently in command, announced that Grace must pay over the value of her estate to him, she walked off the stage in dignified disgust, leaving Winwife standing alone, shell-shocked. As Greg Walker concluded, ‘what, triumphantly, came through loudest of all, were the varying tones of the text itself.’

The most recent major production of the play seems to have been less intent on capturing those ‘varying tones’. This was what was presented, remarkably but correctly, as the play’s first professional production in North America (and, indeed, in the Americas) at the celebrated Stratford Shakespeare Festival of 2009 in the Tom Patterson Theatre at Stratford, Ontario, running in repertory from June to October. There clearly was some awareness in the cast of the complexity of response that can be evoked by the play, for the actor Jonathan Goad, who played Quarlous, told The Toronto Gazette that Jonson scholars cannot agree ‘whether it’s a condemnation of society or ... some kind of strange forgiveness of humanity’ (cited in David Boyles, ‘Recent Ben Jonson Theatrical Events and Productions’, Ben Jonson Journal 17.2 (2010), 260 of 259-68). But the director Antoni Cimolino — the festival’s general director here taking over an individual production for the first time in several years — says in his note on the festival website: ‘Bartholomew Fair is a brilliant satire of class and character in Jacobean London. But far from being bitter, it is a very warm and deliciously funny argument for tolerance. This warmth and inclusiveness, this humanity, have made me fall in love with the play.’ In a subsequent interview with David Boyles he refined this by saying that ‘it is not a play where the audience should feel comfortable. It should be more like a roller-coaster ride... [T]he audience should feel a part of the fair and get swept up in it. Luckily at the Tom Patterson Theatre, we have this great elongated thrust stage, and so we exploited that to make the fair envelop and dominate the audience. We wanted to make it an immersive experience.’ Still, the tone of the play for Cimolino remained ‘celebratory and reflective’, expressing ‘a generosity of spirit’ (Boyles, p. 266).

The production seems to have embodied the director’s vision. Consequently, as Jon Kaplan comments: ‘Too bad this production doesn’t show [the play’s] scary, sordid underbelly more effectively’ (Now Magazine, 28:48, 29 July-5 August, 2009). For M. G. Aune, the middle-class characters’ punishments ‘were softened by the play’s carnival mood,’ while the production went too far in melting down class-distinctions, even though these had been acknowledged in the basically seventeenth-century costumes (M.G. Aune, ‘Review’, Shakespeare, 5:4 (2009), 451-4.)

Still, very effective use was made of the Patterson Theatre, which is not large but has the runway of a thrust stage along much of its length. A dominating but economical and uncluttered fair was re-created with, as Aune relates, Ursula’s booth at one end: ‘Seven 10-foot-long poles were inserted at crooked angles into sockets located along half the stage’s perimeter along the thrust’s upper stage area. To signify Ursula’s booth, strings of flags were suspended from the poles, and a table, chairs and a beer cask were set up underneath’, the whole elaborated by a huge advertising banner, with clouds of smoke and occasional flashes of light from behind. This left plenty of space for quick changes of scene and, when needed, crowds of extras (p. 452).

The staging clearly made possible a vivid ‘roller-coaster ride’ of an experience that left some members of the audience distinctly uncomfortable. With no other experience of the play to draw on — even director and cast found working on it like ‘an archeological dig’ (Cimolino, cited Boyles, p. 268) — it seems that many found the play chaotic in itself, rather than an ordered evocation of chaos. This is particularly evident from the reports of bloggers and less experienced reviewers. Dan Zeff, for example, in his online reviews, found the play ‘an exercise in perplexity’, adding: ‘I must not have been alone in my bafflement because a number of patrons did not return for the second half’ (chicagolandtheaterreviews.com/StratfordFestival.html). For John Coulbourn (Sun Media, 6 June 2009) the production ‘is little short of chaos’, leaving ‘an accomplished but uncontrolled cast’ fighting ‘for individual moments in a spotlight the director either can’t or won’t control.’ He doubted that the play was even stageworthy. Even an appreciative review by Richard Ouzounian (‘Bartholomew Fair is a wild ride worth taking’, Toronto Star, 5 June 2009) acknowledged ‘there are times when one wished for a bit more focus in the middle of the madness and a stronger sense of just where we should look at any given moment.’

But Ouzounian insists that ‘the safest thing to do with this production is to take a deep breath, dive in, and allow its riches to reveal themselves,’ while ‘almost every member of the cast has been encouraged to perform at a level that is dazzling at the still too frequently staid Stratford Festival.’ As Boyles notes: ‘The madcap production earned generally very positive reviews, with many critics calling it the highlight of the Festival’s 2009 season’ (p. 261). This was clearly not going to be the last North American production of the play

*******

After this sustained analysis of major productions, is it possible to reach any provisional conclusions, before moving on to a more condensed account of other performances? Certainly, the leading productions have been very diverse, and none of them could be called anything like definitive. Nor is any likely to be, because Bartholomew Fair is exceptional in the difficulties it sets up, both contingent and inherent.

Contingent difficulties stem, inevitably, from its being so much a play of 1614. Not only have language and society changed profoundly over four centuries, but also the text is intensely topical — it needs footnotes. Other difficulties are intrinsic; in 1614 Bartholomew Fair was already an exceptionally difficult play to stage. It requires a huge cast, for example, with a high level of ensemble acting. A third or more of the text has to be trimmed away to leave a script of performable length, yet very few characters and hardly any episodes can simply be chopped out, and how the cutting is done colours the whole dramatic experience. It requires great caution because the play is so densely plotted, moving groups of characters who were initially distinct through an intricate square-dance of changing relationships. And yet, for all the plotting, there is little ‘story’, in the sense of a strong and engaging narrative; director and audience alike have to be able to juggle several balls of interest. This has to be done despite an inherent tension between foreground and background: most of the play is not only set in a fair, but requires the life of the fair to continue while the main action proceeds. There is therefore some conflict, especially with so complex a play, between clarity of exposition and evocation of atmosphere. The more the background is allowed to flourish, or, indeed, the more the individual actors in the lesser but still richly theatrical roles are allowed to seize attention, the more the coherence of Jonson’s design is under threat. (A simple way to help clarify that design in the modern theatre is to mark the end of each act, either by a short interlude of music or song, or simply by a brief dimming of the lights.) And if all these technical checks and balances were not enough, there is also the dramatic elusiveness of the play. It may seem a slight affair — a day’s outing that embarrasses a few comic characters — and yet it is a play that has repeatedly been read as a comic analogue of King Lear in its radical and even destructive questioning of orthodoxy. Finally, as analysed in the Introduction, there is the enigmatic nature of a play that dares to invite incompatible modes of interpretation, a play that is genial and mellow from one perspective and harsh and sour from another. Can a single performance suggest such modulation? Is it true, as Ned Chaillet has written, that ‘producers can’t have it both ways . . . and have to opt for seduction or irony’?

At the least, it is clear that a company mounting a production faces a series of fundamental and inter-related decisions. What, first of all, is to be cut from the text? The induction, for example, has often been dispensed with, yet this changes the whole occasion, for the induction brings home the theatricality of the play as a dramatic construct inviting our independent, critical relish. To reverse the words of John Arden cited above, it becomes not a fair but a play about some fictional people at a fair. We are invited to watch not an action but the presentation of an action.

When, historically, is this action to be placed? The leading modern productions show no consistency, and have chosen either around 1614, or the late nineteenth century, or the late twentieth, or range across diverse periods. Paradoxically, the directors proclaim unanimity on one thing: allowing Jonson to speak as directly as possible to modern audiences. Does setting the play in 1614 doom it to a quaint and baffling remoteness or allow Jonson to speak on his own terms? Does a modern setting establish Jonson as our contemporary or merely show that he isn’t? Does an intervening period enrich the play by interrelating diverse stages of society, or merely replace one historical problem with another? Does an eclectic approach demonstrate the unchanging essentials of human nature and the permanent immediacy of Jonson’s insights, or does it merely forfeit the representation of a particular, credible society? The very diversity of practice suggests there is no best answer, but the lack of a convincing alternative also suggests that a Jacobean setting should not lightly be discounted.

The most challenging objection to the most acute of modern productions — Boswell’s for the RSC in 1997 — was that its modern setting ‘makes it marginally more accessible while denying its documentary truth’ (Michael Billington, The Guardian, 13 December 1997). This was principally because it could not do justice to the very real puritan threat exploited by (rather than embodied in) the hypocritical Busy. Allowing for the very real differences involved, it is illuminating here to consider how Wagner’s Ring is diminished by productions that seek to demonstrate its ‘relevance’: stage the Rhine as a power station, or present the isolated Siegfried as a modern teenager with junk food and a Gameboy, or make the Norns old ladies knitting in a residential home, and the mythical reach of the operas shrinks into this or that local concern. Lift Bartholomew Fair out of the very real society and occasion in which it is rooted and it tends to be shrunk into a preconceived configuration. Anachronism is less open to multiple perspectives than a Jacobean Bartholomew Fair is.

A third factor shaping the production as a whole is the size and nature of the auditorium chosen or available. Although Jonson wrote for a large stage at the Hope and a smaller but still substantial one at the Banqueting House, and although the staging of the play was undoubtedly complex by contemporary standards, it is designed (as argued in the first section above) for economical realization through a few major props. It is telling that critics were unanimous that the Old Vic production of 1950 improved markedly when it switched from the immensity of the Assembly Room to the more familiar dimensions of the Old Vic Theatre itself. Whereas most leading companies have responded expansively to such an expansive text, the latest RSC production chose a small theatre and reaped the benefits of intimacy and intensity.

The choice of auditorium is hardly to be distinguished from the role of the fair within the performance. Major productions in large theatres have expressed the critical commonplace that the fair itself is ‘the play’s true protagonist’ (Teague, 1985, 122), and would have welcomed as ideal John Arden’s sense that he had actually ‘been at a fair’. Yet arguably the fair is no more the subject of the play than the bell is the subject of The Bell by Iris Murdoch. What matters is how the characters react to the catalyst of bell or fair, and an interpretation based on the true subject of the play — the rite of passage undergone by the middle-class visitors — is more likely to be encouraged by a simpler mise en scène and hence a smaller auditorium.

This relates in turn to the central issue: the tone of an interpretation. An expansive re-creation of the fair, represented at its best in Richard Eyre’s productions, leads almost inevitably to a festive occasion and a keener response to the genial perspective on the play. The fair as milieu and as catalyst, as at Stratford in 1997, concentrates attention on the visitors, and heightens awareness of the darker and more satirical perspective. Although it is common to say, with Frances Teague, that in such a play ‘nothing succeeds like excess’ (1985, 116), it is at least as valid to argue that in this play less is more. As Michael Coveney wrote of the National Theatre version: ‘If you go for one tumultuous side show, you lose the texture and detail of the characters.’ The darker RSC productions were more open to the extreme tonal disparities of the work than those generating a mood of festivity and joyous farce.

OTHER MODERN PRODUCTIONS

The return of Bartholomew Fair to major professional stages has been accompanied by a vigorous undergrowth of smaller professional, semi-professional, university, and amateur productions. Many of these have announced that in performing the play they are reviving a rarity, but with over sixty modern productions on record (and listed in Appendix 3) it now seems again to have — despite the challenge it sets up — an established, though less than prominent, place in the repertoire. It is encouraging that these productions have not been confined to the UK or even to the English language: performances are also recorded in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Eire, France, Germany, New Zealand, and of course the United States, while the text has been translated into Hungarian as well as the major western languages (Benedek, 1961).

The great variety of these productions attests to the play’s vitality as well as its difficulties. They have been indoor and outdoor (many companies see the play as suitable for festive summer performances out of doors), large and small in scale, and set in all periods or none. Where evidence survives, the most marked continuity has been the productions’ emphasis on sheer fun. Programmes and reviews use terms such as ‘romp’ and ‘rumbustious’ as a matter of course, and this is unsurprising, especially in the amateur performances, since it is more inviting to play for laughs than to seek an uneasy and precarious balance between laughter and disenchanted satire. Nevertheless, such performances, however simplified, have helped to entrench the play in the repertory.

Another sign that the play is both alive and difficult is that several times it has been freely adapted, re-shaped in order to catch something of its vitality in a new medium or form, and also re-shaped for accessibility. The first of these seems to have been a very free musical version performed by MUSKET (Michigan Union Show, Ko-Eds Too) at the University of Michigan in 1962, with lyrics by Jack O’Brien and music by Bob James (who went on to a professional career in composition), and the most recent is Bartholomew Fair, NJ, by Billy Mitchell (2009), a loose adaptation set in New Jersey in 1985, with five actors playing nineteen characters. There is also an adaptation in French as La foire de St-Bartholomé, by Antonine Maillet, performed by the Thé tre du Rideau Vert, Quebec, in 1994. Perhaps also a performance by a small and new but inventive professional troupe committed to teamwork, Ensemble Theatre Project Canberra, should be regarded as an adaptation. Its production at Australian National University in 1986, the year after its foundation, was supported by a government grant. There was a good deal of cross-dressing (for example, Grace was played by the man who also played Mooncalf, and Winwife by the woman who also played Punk Alice), and, with almost all the cast playing two or three parts, some of the doublings would have been difficult or impossible in Jonson’s text, such as Purecraft/Edgworth and Knockem/Troubleall.

Two UK adaptations may stand as instances of how and how not to do it. A version by Raymond Raikes for the BBC Third Programme in 1968 was, unfortunately, a travesty. Although prepared for a verbal medium, the play was shredded down to an hour and a half and the rich exuberance of language pared away, leaving only the more elementary word-play. The impoverishment of language made characters such as Overdo, Wasp, and even Busy less extreme and bizarre than in Jonson. Everything was sacrificed for simple fun; not only the pimp Whit and his bully-boy Cutting but also Troubleall and even Quarlous were omitted, and with them, especially the morally aware but increasingly compromised Quarlous, went all moral complexity and intensity. The Justice’s abuse of Grace through his power gained at the Court of Wards was, of course, deleted; with Troubleall absent, Mrs Purecraft and her hypocrisy appeared only in Act 1. All the middle-class visitors to the Fair were softened, their roguery and hypocrisy allowed to fade away — Cokes didn’t even mean to steal the pears. This early case of the BBC’s ‘dumbing down’ of its cultural role took to an extreme the persistent reduction of the play to simple farce.

The example of how to do it was Roger Savage’s adaptation of the play as Bartlemy Fair for Theatre in the Park, a blend of amateur and professional performers at Bracknell Arts Centre in 1975, directed by John Cumming, who was then in charge of the Centre. Again, this presented the play as sheer fun, and it also took to an extreme the tendency to set the play within a fair, but it was inventive and ingenious and it did not pretend to be Jonson’s play. Behind it lay Savage’s mixed experience when directing Bartholomew Fair for a small but enterprising company, Downstage, at Wellington, New Zealand, ten years earlier. The company, which is now New Zealand’s longest-running professional troupe, was then on the verge of transforming itself from primarily amateur to professional, and this was a transitional production, underwritten for the first time by the Arts Council but with amateurs among the professionals. Its home was the sixty-seat Walkabout Theatre in a café, but this was too small to support a professional company, and Bartholomew Fair, at the 370-seat, proscenium-arch Memorial Theatre in Victoria University, was an attempt to demonstrate that it could manage large-scale productions of classic plays.

The result was three hours of a straightforward and orthodox performance of a fairly full text in period costume and straightforward style by a talented cast, which included the poet Peter Bland as Busy — and the distinguished bibliographer Don McKenzie as second puppet. In the event, the attempt may have been premature, as Nola Millar, reviewing it for NZBC radio, commented: ‘It is hard to say why Downstage made the curious decision to pause in what they are doing so well and take on something for which they are not yet equipped.’ Roger Savage would not have disagreed, since he writes: ‘As a production it was, I think, so-so . . . The Eiger-like challenge of the play is to make the plot clear AND get the full flavour of the excellent-creeping-sport atmosphere. It’s not too difficult to succeed in the one OR the other; but both at the same time? It largely defeated me. I think my production wasn’t bad as a monochrome etching (so to speak) of the play, but it didn’t have enough colour, fantasy, outrageousness, smell’ (private correspondence).

The Theatre in the Park production, in the grounds of South Hill Park, Bracknell, was an opportunity to try for these qualities. In Dr Savage’s words, ‘There was more of those things [in the adaptation] . . . This was an open-air local-community affair with quite a bit of London talent stirred in . . . I guess I was tackling the same issue as in the Wellington show but from the other side: you can’t — unless perhaps you’re a Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Georgio Strehler or whoever — deliver a total Bartholomew Fair to a modern audience: something has to go. Hence my re-writing effrontery.’ The audience sat around, and among, ‘Bartlemy’s Celebrated Fair’, which was supposedly made up of stallholders and entertainers from the old Bartholomew Fair who, in the summer of 1875, twenty years after civic killjoys had finally closed down the Smithfield fair, were making their annual visit to the country town of Bracknell. Jonson’s plot, language, and allusions were translated into mid-Victorian terms, and while that left the dialogue colourless by Jonsonian standards, it had a limpidity suitable for outdoor performance, with the text as a platform for histrionics rather than the focus of attention. A great deal went on behind and around the speakers. All action took place in the fair facing and surrounding the audience — the show people were introduced first, and exposition from Jonson’s Act 1 was deftly incorporated into later scenes — and the evening’s entertainment lasted some four hours, with the play itself running for 150 minutes of this. There were not only puppets but also ballad singers, fire-eaters, wrestlers, jugglers, and dancers, with pork, sausages, ale, and gingerbread available throughout the evening. The style of performance was versatile, envisaged as both Pinero farce and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Music was important, composed by Mike Westbrook, and played by him and his All Star Brass Band. Leatherhead’s puppet show — neatly translated into the tale of Punch and Julie, a version in boisterous fourteeners of the now more familiar legend of Romeo and Juliet — was eleven times suspended by a series of ‘grand tableaux and affecting mimes for the puppets, each accompanied by the fairground orchestra in elegant and inspiriting renditions of apt airs and dances’. Audience and performers overlapped and interrelated, and the audience was invited to join in singing choruses or in ritual pantomime exchanges. Reviewers found the performance rather slow-moving, but for some of the audience it was magic. A friend recalls the evening with delight: ‘I just remember some children sitting in front of me who became totally involved in the plot. That alone made me realize what good, popular theatre Bartholomew Fair can be’ (Prof. Peter Walls, private communication).

There have been few other professional or largely professional productions. In 1970, Newcastle Playhouse Company became the Tyneside Theatre Company, and the Playhouse was replaced by the University Theatre (the title preferred by an anonymous donor), with Bartholomew Fair chosen as the inaugural production to show off a stage of unusual depth and flexibility (John Mapplebeck, Sunday Times, 28 November). But the builders fell behind schedule, and not only rehearsals suffered. The building was not ready; on safety grounds, it was initially granted only a two-day licence for public performances, and the theatre was still being finished on the day of the first performance. The lighting circuits had been in place for only a few hours, and not all were working properly. The third night was actually the first time the cast was able to go through the play on stage without interruption. Nevertheless, they gave ‘a surprising display of unflappability’ (Malcolm Grey, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 December 1970), and Richard Pickett’s design for the large new stage was found very striking. In 1972, the Deutsches Nationaltheater, Weimar, marked Jonson’s quatercentenary with a production that, unsurprisingly for the national theatre of a Marxist state, tended to idealize the low-life characters. At a colloquium in Weimar on 23 April that year, the director Fritz Bennewitz argued that whereas the Fair’s visitors are static and conformist, the fair folk express themselves freely and are not corseted or atrophied by a single drive. Edgworth, consequently, was presented as a lovable figure, a kind of Robin Hood stealing from the rich what belongs to the poor, and was such a master-craftsman that he wore white gloves and had a set of surgical instruments inside his jacket. Some of the inventive touches sound more plausible: Bennewitz sought a poetic realism rather than naturalism, and the brawls were done in slow tempo, with noise over the loudspeakers. He also dealt with the problem of how to portray Busy at the play’s close by making his capitulation at the end of 5.5 merely a tactical withdrawal in a hopeless plight, before he could attach himself parasitically as spiritual guide to another host (1973, 44-6). In 1984, the experimental group TN Theatre Company, Brisbane, directed by Rod Wissler, performed the play in their intimate, informal theatre in a converted church, which was transformed into a carnival for the occasion. Doubling made performance by a versatile cast of seventeen possible. A vivid rehearsal photograph in The Australian for 13 August shows a motley collection of mainly modern costumes and suggests that the performance would live up the company’s watchword of vitality. Richard Fotheringham, of the University of Queensland, recalls it, however, as less than fully successful: ‘A nice first act in front of a Brechtian half-curtain, but when it opened up to the fairground the action moved upstage and a big hell’s-mouth at the back swallowed its energy and acoustics’ (private communication). Finally, in May 1996 Bartholomew Fair was given a public reading at the reconstructed Globe Theatre on London’s South Bank. This was co-ordinated by Alan Cox, and led by Peter Bayliss, who played Justice Overdo, as he had done in the Peter Barnes productions of 1978 and 1987. Although only a reading, Geoff Felix’s puppets used at the National Theatre production of 1988 were borrowed for the occasion. Unfortunately, the play has yet to be acted at the new Globe, the modern theatre that most resembles the Hope where it was first performed.

Despite the difficulties it poses, Bartholomew Fair is so rife with theatrical possibilities that it can be engagingly performed by young actors. As mentioned above, the National Youth Theatre has twice made a showpiece of the play, for the tenth anniversary season in 1966 on a rather small stage at the Royal Court, when it was the first non-Shakespearean play performed by the company, and opening the silver jubilee season in 1981 at the Shaw Theatre, London. Both were strongly political productions: all MPs were invited to the first, as part of the company’s case for a permanent theatre; the second was also aimed at those of influence, because the Arts Council had withdrawn its funding and it was feared this jubilee season would also be the last. The aim was to show the strength of the company’s ensemble in a text requiring panache rather than a searching inwardness of its actors.

The 1966 production was certainly notable for its gusto and horseplay. As Ronald Bryden wrote, there was ‘a stronger company than for some time past, and a play young actors can cope with better than the Shakespearean summits . . . Not all the cast could make sense of the crabbed Jacobean scurrility, but they flung themselves into its comic exaggerations and racy intricacies with a boisterousness which at one point bounced a pint pot off the wife of the BBC’s head of TV drama, sitting in the second row’ (The Observer, 4 September). Ann Shearer added: ‘At best Paul Hill’s production has a joyful indiscipline, the cast almost bursting through the proscenium and shouting, above all shouting, at the pitch of their lungs’ (The Guardian, 31 August). Rotten fruit and other odds and ends of the fair were thrown about with ‘a delicious abandon. The stage is inches deep in mess by the end . . . The evening is really only carried by infectious enthusiasm and plenty of pleasant little caricatures.’ It is nevertheless a sign of the talent available that actors other than David Suchet as Edgworth were picked out for praise, especially twenty-year-old Gwynneth Powell in several yards of foam rubber padding as Ursula, acting with the company for the first time after three years backstage, ‘massive, greasy, bloodied, and baring a revoltingly diseased leg as proudly as a banner’ (Peter Lewis, Daily Mail, 31 August). Nevertheless, the experience of the production was so magical for Suchet that as the run ended he decided ‘at that moment that I wanted to be part of this special world of storytelling and make-believe for the rest of my life’ (Mousetrap Theatre Projects, www.mousetrap.org.uk).

The silver jubilee production of 1981 aroused unusually diverse views. Whereas Nicholas de Jongh thought it the ‘abysmal’ work of an inexperienced director who had left his youthful cast without a sense of style or how to speak Jonson’s language or create an impression of fairground vitality (The Guardian, 20 August), Ned Chaillet thought that the cast had been given a clear understanding of their roles and that the various groups related well to one another ‘with actions that invest the stage with life, but which do not detract from the lines being spoken elsewhere in the crowd’ (The Times, 20 August). In the Daily Telegraph, ‘M. D. H.’ thought Bartholomew Fair an ideal choice of play and gave warm but qualified praise to the ‘immense amount of activity throughout, even sometimes far too much business in the background to allow one to hear the words in the foreground’ (20 August). Rosemary Say enjoyed some bustling crowd scenes and stylish characterisation, ‘but as with most other productions of this deceptively simple play it is hard work to maintain interest in a circuitous plot that defeats the young players as surely as it does their professional seniors’ (Sunday Telegraph, 23 August). Reviewers were clearly torn between limited satisfaction with the performance and sympathy for the company, through the outrage widely felt at the Arts Council’s withdrawal of funding from such an important enterprise. The Council had insisted that public funds should support only professional companies, and, as Ned Chaillet wrote, ‘since professionals organize, train, direct, design, and write for the young actors, the Council could at least support the professional work, without even backtracking’.

There was another youth production with a huge and talented cast at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in 1979, when the Belgrade’s Youth Theatre performed in the main house for the first time. The production sought to avoid a period quaintness; as the programme noted, ‘in order to underline the play’s universal qualities and to help "place” some of its social groups, this production fuses visual elements from a number of periods’, ranging from 1614 to 1855. Nevertheless, the mood was kept light. Peter McGarry found the play a ‘dazzling, pulsating, and generally quite joyous romp . . . Acidity gives way to a mellow irony. There’s a higher degree of affection just beneath the surface of rivalry and emotional and physical unmasking’ (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 6 September). The director, John Ginman, whose expert marshalling of the cast of sixty was praised, had Michael Boyd, the future artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as his assistant, while Laurence Boswell, who would direct Bartholomew Fair for the RSC in 1997, was picked out for praise as Quarlous. In 1989, another performance ranging across historical periods was given by Contact Youth Theatre at the University Theatre, Manchester. It was clearly a production that caught the eye: ‘Designer Kendra Ullyart has provided a large, primary-colours adventure playground of a fair, with an impressive carousel as the centrepiece, and the thirty or so cast are dressed in a lavish array of finery from a range of periods’ (Alan Hulme, Manchester Evening News, 23 March). According to Hulme, however, there was ‘a puzzling lack of energy in individual performances’ from this ‘usually exhilarating and adventurous youth theatre’.

University productions have had an important part in restoring Bartholomew Fair to the repertory. The pioneering performances at Bryn Mawr College in 1940 and by the Marlowe Society at Cambridge in 1947 have already been mentioned, and there was another by the Dunedin Teachers’ College, New Zealand, in 1952. The Marlowe production came at the beginning of a rich period for Cambridge drama, when John Barton, Peter Hall, Jonathan Miller, and others were beginning to make waves. Miller himself made a remarkable impact as Troubleall in an Amateur Dramatic Club production at the ADC Theatre, Cambridge, in 1955. ‘T. H.’ in the Cambridge Daily News, 26 November, wrote:

It is fortunate that that copper-headed zany, Jonathan Miller, is touched with natural brilliance as a comic because he gives an appallingly slipshod performance . . . I did not understand one single word he said . . . yet he made me laugh louder and longer than anyone else . . . Mr Miller clucks insanely like a hen-coop raided by a fox, he drums lunatic cadenzas with his naked toes and the way in which he swathes himself round with a cloak is the most alarmingly comic thing I have seen in Cambridge . . . He is a natural comedian, and natural comedians are almost as rare as unicorns.

It was not, however, a one-man show. Those praised among the talented cast included Daniel Massey as Cokes, Robin Chapman as Busy, David Buck as Overdo, and Toni Drabble (the future novelist, A. S. Byatt) as Win. There was, according to ‘T. H.’, an ‘eye-entrancing set . . . of rampant, untidy impressionism’, and ‘a prodigality of false noses on stage’, with Busy’s the largest. The director, Robin Midgley, just managed to keep the rich brew of ‘this magnificently plotless piece of theatre’ from boiling over. An anonymous review in The Times was less enthusiastic: it was ‘a somewhat stiffer test of amateur resources than perhaps even the occasion [the company’s centenary] warrants . . . Even professional producers are bothered by the fair and find it difficult to capture its roaring atmosphere and suggestions of groups melting in and out of crowds . . . Realistic satire and fantastic caricature are not to be separated, and the producer’s task . . . is one of the nicest possible calculation’ (24 November). But Robin Midgley ‘turns the whole thing into rough and tumble comedy’. Nevertheless, I find that Miller’s Troubleall and other highlights of the production are vividly recalled half a century later by some of those who saw it.

Bartholomew Fair returned to Cambridge in 1977 with a second Marlowe Society production at the Arts Theatre, directed and designed by Griff Rhys Jones, a production that was intended to make a splash, and did. As Rhys Jones recollects, the forty or so who auditioned and did not get a part were set up as walk-on stallholders and were called on to build their market stall on a three-storey scaffolding stage of old sleepers in front of the audience. There were also what Rhys Jones calls some ‘fake scandals’: there was a striking poster of a pig’s head superimposed on a nude woman with large breasts. The RSPCA, deliberately misled into believing that there would live pigs on stage, ‘let out a torrent of pain and outrage’, banned the use of any pigs, and created a gratifying flurry of publicity, which included a feature on page four of The Sun. ‘We sold out. The event had a fantastic buzz.’ The exuberant preparations carried over into the theatre. The stallholders called out their wares during the play and took their stalls down at the end. The interval bar was virtually inaccessible unless one had first surrendered to the energetic ploys of those selling ballads, gingerbread, and hobbyhorses. (Citations from Rhys Jones in Christiansen, 1996, 84, and the society’s website: http://marlowe.soc.srcf.net.)

The performance itself blended authenticity and fantasy. Rhys Jones was also directing the Cambridge Footlights Revue at the time, and brought many with revue skills into the cast, including the Footlights president, Jimmy Mulville, who, as Jones notes, was ‘then a famously belligerent Liverpudlian undergraduate’, and who ‘did a droll audition and was cast as Jordan Knockem. He had some excellent business with live chickens and a fight with a tea tray.’ Yet the tea tray had a point. Martin Butler remembers (in a private communication) that it was used in 4.4 to help convey the rationale of the game of vapours: the quarrellers threw the tray on the ground and each stood on it in turn as he contradicted the others, then was pushed off as he too was contradicted. Moreover, as Peter Holland recalls (private communication):

The rehearsal process involved the students taking a stall on Cambridge market. The idea wasn’t to sell things but to watch people selling, to learn how traders sell their wares. It translated well into the performance, which had that ability from character after character to keep focus on a customer until a sale is sure and then to be looking around for the next customer, using the eyes to track across the people. It produced a real sense in the interval of our being their customers, too, as they spilled off the stage and into the stalls, making us buy as we went past. At the end, as the tourists headed off to their dinner, there was a big roar of sound from the fair people as they started up their selling again, a cacophony of sound. For me — son of market traders! — I found it superbly solid in its sense of the reality of trade, and that made the contact between fair and visitors all the stronger, an economic process in which to be a tourist is to spend, spend, spend.

For B. A. Young, the performance was ‘so outstandingly good that it should stand as a criterion for a long time to come’ (Financial Times, 10 March). The play was ideal for an undergraduate company, and ‘the more crowded the stage is, the better it looks . . . There is no time when something of interest isn’t happening.’ And yet the performance remained true to the play, set in period and ‘letting the text speak for itself without any business added from a too fertile imagination.’ The tone was often farcical: ‘The action goes on at a terrific lick, fight after fight, humiliation after humiliation — the very essence of farce.’ Yet the characters were not too simplified, and the production was more open to tonal subtleties than some professional interpretations. For Young, Gordon Hammersley as Quarlous, for example, was ‘the very pattern of the arrogant young burgher to whom the common people exist only for amusement’. Martin Butler adds, in his edition: ‘This production gave full weight to the delightfulness and absurdity of events, but pitted against these a consciousness of the brutality of farce and of the painfulness of the fools’ slow recognition of their idiocy. Here the true climax was Overdo’s abortive arraignment, and in the justice’s ensuing discomfiture his apologetic gesture of reconciliation was all but lost as the clatter of voices and stalls renewed in the Fair behind him’ (1989, 151).

The Experimental Theatre Club of Oxford University has twice presented Bartholomew Fair, and, as with the Cambridge events, these were amateur productions studded with future professionals. For example, for the ETC production at a specially constructed riverside theatre at the University Open-Air Theatre Festival, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1959, the future film director Ken Loach was one of the directors and played Knockem, Dudley Moore composed some of the music and played Nightingale, Oliver Davies was Captain Whit, and Michael Billington, who for many years has been chief drama critic of The Guardian, took the small part of Haggis. The site in Avonbank Gardens was exploited in that two duckings in the river were added to Overdo’s humiliations, but temptations to over-act were resisted: the cast ‘skilfully inhabit Jonson’s world without skipping into the trap of music-hall’. It was a carefully polished and detailed performance: ‘A final word for an anonymous costermonger, whose mincing confusion of apples and pears is like all else here, intelligent and comically bright as a needle’ (Gareth Lloyd Evans, Manchester Guardian, 29 July). Frank Dibb agreed that ‘gimmicks were mercifully eschewed’ and thought ‘the only serious mistake’ was playing Busy as ‘a saturnine, bearded and be-moustached figure who seemed, apart from his jarring, out-of-place Cockney accent, to have more affinity with the Inquisition than with the "Banbury Men”’ (Plays and Players, September 1959). This may suggest, however, that the reviewer was expecting a simple farce where a kill-joy who is exploiting a real threat would be out of place.

In May 1975, ETC in partnership with Magdalen Players staged Bartholomew Fair in the woodland setting of the deer park at Magdalen College, Oxford, with a talented team including a future television writer and executive in the director and producer and two future novelists and a future all-round man of the theatre playing the fairground toughs, Edgworth, Whit, and Leatherhead. According to a private communication from the director, Mark Holloway, the production developed out of the work of a small group, based at the Oxford Students’ Art Centre, interested in forms of alternative theatre then in vogue, such as street theatre, performance art, ensemble work, and circus skills, and the aim was to set the play in a saturnalian and popular carnival, though without slighting its ‘startlingly modern evaluation of society’. In the event, not all the ambitions could be realised, but it remained a promenade production, beginning at the entrance arch into the deer park, where the audience was met and escorted by musicians and jugglers. Pears and gingerbread were (profitably) available, there was a costume bear, and so on. The first act was played on a simple platform, with the audience and cast standing or sitting around, and then everyone went across the park together to a set with stalls either side of a large flat in the shape of a lurid pig’s head, whose mouth was the entrance to Ursula’s booth. A real Punch and Judy show, with glove puppets, was used in Act 5. The vitality of the performance is suggested in a survey of summer productions in the student newspaper: ‘Of the classic plays in production, Bartholomew Fair alone would seem to show any originality or attempt to utilise the particular opportunities of the Oxford summer. The combination of an eccentric and lively play and an eccentric and lively garden staging deserves to do well, even if all the eccentricity does threaten to get out of hand’ (J.G. Reever, Cherwell, 28 May). Interestingly, Holloway comments: ‘I now realise that Ursula should have been played by a man in drag. She clearly belongs somewhere on the rocky road that leads from Noah’s wife to Widow Twanky.’

Other university productions are less well recorded than those at Oxbridge, and some may have been less ambitious. The performance at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1963, for example, seems to have worked well in its relative straightforwardness, and, according to Arthur Colby Sprague, ‘audience and actors were at one in their robust enjoyment’ (Teague, 1985, 114). The same year saw the first of several university productions in Australia, by the Graduate Dramatic Society at the Sunken Garden, University of Western Australia, Perth. Three years later, St Paul’s and St John’s Colleges, University of Sydney, brought a production to the twenty-first Inter-Varsity Drama Festival at the University of Queensland. Roslyn Atkinson (private communication) recalls that the audience sat in the open air in the middle of the great court, with tents around them for the booths. According to Graham Dowland in the student union newspaper, ‘the aim was to break illusion of reality so that the audience could experience the play in a Fair atmosphere’ (Semper Floreat, 15 September 1966, 17). Theatrical illusion was disrupted by having most of the characters in modern dress, performing around, among, and behind the audience in the open, with ‘buxom wenches’ to supply grog and cheese. Some of the acting was limited, but Wanda Romaine as Ursula and Charles Zara as Wasp acted up to their larger-than-life dialogue; the pace was fast, and the set and props were suitably garish. In the Adelaide University Society’s major production for 1969, the student director Colin Pearce took a similar tendency further: period dress was abandoned in favour of costumes and behaviour found in 1960s hippies. The cast of over thirty included guest appearances by a well-known music-hall performer, Roz Ramsay, as Ursula, and by Peter Meredith, of the university’s English Department, as Justice Overdo. A production by Sydney University Drama Society at the university in 1978 was a turning-point in the career of its director, Neil Armfield, now a noted director and maker of the only Australian film to date of a Shakespeare play (Twelfth Night). ‘It was because of this production’, recalls Armfield in a private communication, ‘that I was encouraged to "hang around” the Nimrod and observe rehearsals’ (Nimrod Theatre Company, 1970-87, then based in the theatre of that name at Sydney, is ‘widely regarded as having fostered a new Australian style in professional theatre and initially was fairly radical’ — private communication from Prof. Richard Madelaine). As a result, Armfield was propelled away from academic life (where he had a research scholarship on the theatre of Jonson) into professional theatre, and he was one of the Nimrod directors in 1980-82. Another Australian production which set the Fair within the atmosphere of a fair was given at the Rusden Theatre of Victoria College in Clayton, Melbourne (a college of advanced education that through a series of amalgamations was to become part of Deakin University) in October and November 1985. The poster promised ‘the Genius of Smithfield every day during the Fair’, and offered ‘Wombwell’s Menagerie’ with ‘the striped and untameable hyæna’ and ‘two superb African ostriches rare and stupendous’ as well as Ursula’s Pig Palace and Leatherhead’s ‘famous Puppet Theatre’. It was produced and directed by Robert Holden. (Private communication from Bernard Newsome.)

Unlike other university troupes, the Manchester University Stage Society, which performed Bartholomew Fair at the Renold Theatre in 1965, was not a student group and was composed mainly of academics, though some went on to careers in professional theatre. It was an ambitious and successful company and in its first decade mounted over twenty productions of plays rarely put on elsewhere, some of them translated by members of the company. According to ‘B J.’ (Manchester Evening News, 19 May) this production did not quite manage the difficult balance between foreground and background: the large cast was grouped in lively patterns, but the noisy bustle tended to freeze for the speeches and passages of action. Individual performances were, nevertheless, highly praised, such as the fussy self-importance of Ian Duncan as Littlewit and the pompous piety of Tony Ridge as Busy. It was a stylish production: ‘Arnold Hinchliffe manages his elaborate costume [as Quarlous] with the foppish masculinity of an Elizabethan gallant, [and] Jill Truman is a beautiful Grace, serene as a formal portrait.’

In 1966, a talented undergraduate cast, including four future professional stage directors, gave a spirited performance at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire. Wasp was played by Jerry Zaks, now a four-times Tony Award winner for directing, Littlewit by Robert Morgan, costume designer and director, Bristle by Donald Marcus, producer and director, and the stage manager was the future actor and director Charles Karchmer. In addition, Nightingale was played by Robert Montgomery, a playwright, and, of all characters, Whit by the future Secretary of Labour under President Clinton, Robert Reich. The tone of the production directed by James H. Clancy is suggested by a review in the campus press: ‘"Atmosphere” is the key word . . . This isn’t really a play — it is a country fair’ (James Gibb, The Dartmouth, 11 May). It was made visually alive by George W. Schoenhut’s ingenious and versatile set of timber booths and skeletal frames, and by workmanlike costumes that, without seeking for detailed authenticity, were apt for the period. An evening of gusto ended with an elaboration on Justice Overdo’s closing invitation: the audience was invited to exit over the stage and take refreshments backstage.

Another ambitious production in an academic setting was given by the Folger Theatre Group in their 1972-3 season, with several of the major roles taken by professional actors. It was one of the early productions in a theatre designed by the Folger Library’s architect in the early 1930s as an evocation of a typical Elizabethan playhouse, as then understood, and not regularly used for performances until changes were made in 1970. Despite this, the action was set during the period of the Industrial Revolution. Photographs suggest, however, that the set strikingly realised a timeless fair of timber, rope, and coarse netting, populated by characters in a variety of eye-catching costumes. It was a sexy and bold production, especially in the ‘puppet’ show performed by human actors, and in the amply-endowed Ursula of Barbara Meyer.

In 1978, students on the MA in Theatre Studies at the University of Leeds, directed by Alan Ram, took on the extreme challenge of presenting Bartholomew Fair with a small cast in the university’s tiny Workshop Theatre. ‘We couldn’t achieve a teeming, fairground sort of feel’ in such a theatre (reports the director in a personal communication), and the stress fell on a stripped-down version of the major characters’ experiences. In 1982 alone there were three varied student productions. The Revels Players at the University of Illinois, Urbana, had been formed in 1970 to perform classic early drama other than Shakespeare and, according to its on-line history, ‘seemed to have run out of gas by 1982’, although it was revived later. Nevertheless that was the year it tackled Bartholomew Fair. Michael Shapiro, the producer, reports: ‘The costumes were derived from a variety of periods in order to create an impression of timelessness. Thus, Winwife had the slick look of the 1920s, while Quarlous was dressed in Beau Brummel Regency attire; one watchman wore a Boy Scout uniform, the other a red beret and "Guardian Angels” tank top.’ Cokes was ‘boy eternal in lace collar and Eton-style jacket’ and Busy ‘a sleazy Southern Baptist preacher in torn tennis shoes and food-stained suit’. In costume and mannerisms, the puppets imitated characters in the main action. A blue-and-white striped awning hung over the fair scenes to suggest a circus or carnival, with the pig booth and its tables and stools at one side and Leatherhead’s booth and Trash’s table at the other. ‘A small crowd of fairgoers and vendors, selling balloons, popcorn, and the like, passed over the playing area from time to time and also mingled freely with the audience during the intermission . . . On the whole, the production stressed the comic rather than the satiric values of the play, mainly through brisk pacing and broadly farcical bits of stage business’ (RORD, 26, 1983,] 78).

In June 1982, Bartholomew Fair was produced at the Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury, primarily by the fifteen second-year students on the single-honours Drama course at the University of Kent, but with many of the roles taken by first-years. Three of the team of directors were undergraduates, though they were led by a former theatre education director. It is clear from the advance publicity that the production was tackled with gusto. For many, however, it was their first public appearance, and judging from a rather dismissive review in the Kentish Gazette (25 June) it must have been more valuable as a learning experience than a finished performance. In the same month, the future RSC director, Laurence Boswell, directed a production by a student group, the Summer Company, at Manchester University Theatre.

The production at the studio theatre of the University of Alberta, Canada, in the spring of 1988 used an almost uncut text and emphasised the experience of being at a fair. ‘The director (Carl Hare) transformed the auditorium of the theatre and the lobby — as well as the proscenium/thrust stage — into the world of the play, so that the audience was immersed from beginning to end. The lobby became the site of street vendors and buskers, and the audience responded well, perhaps because they were not allowed to remain distant from the play and its characters, and they were actively discouraged from creating a division between audience and actor spaces’ (private communication from Mary Blackstone). In 1992, the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School performed Bartholomew Fair at the New Vic Theatre as part of an ambitious summer showcase programme, in tandem with two Sondheim productions at the Theatre Royal and a season of lunchtime plays at the New Vic.

In 2005 came one of the most idiosyncratic productions of the play, when the Marlowe Society of Cambridge presented it for the third time, this time out of doors and for a single evening, on 23 June, at the new Maria Björnson Theatre in the gardens of Robinson College. It brought the festive indulgences of Jonson’s August fair and All Souls weekend into the festivities rounding off the Cambridge academic year, in so-called ‘May Week’, and for many of those taking place it was also a rounding off of their years as Cambridge students. The co-directors, Alex Outhwaite and Joe Swarbrick, were themselves finalists, and the performance was put together in the brief remainder of term after their exams finished. Alex had ten days left for rehearsals and Joe the comparative luxury of sixteen.

In the event, it seems that the play and the performance served the festive occasion to perfection, with a very responsive full house of 200. As Alex Outhwaite writes in a private communication, ‘It was to be more a theatrical “happening” than a typical play. Our concept for the show was a one-off, fairground spectacular, staged outdoors and in promenade style. We wanted to have an actual Jacobean fair.’ The whole evening lasted over five hours: there was a fairly full version of the text, and the audience was invited to arrive two hours before the play itself began. There it was treated to two roast hogs, gin punch, a performance by the Milton Morris Men, and a nonsensical wrestling match between Puppy and Jordan Knockem, while members of the cast juggled, hassled, and harassed. The Costermonger and Joan Trash mingled about, selling gingerbread, apples, and pears, the actress playing Nordern read palms, and Punk Alice sidled up to the odd unsuspecting male in the audience.

The play was performed by a cast of thirty, including jugglers, plate-spinners, comedians, and many of the best student-actors of the time. The action, followed by the audience, moved between the raised stage at one end of the theatre and a tented parade of booths at the other, with crowded stalls to one side for Leatherhead and Trash. Costumes, largely in period, were very bold and colourful. This was in keeping with what Alex Outhwaite terms the ‘frenetic rawness’ of the production. The under-rehearsed performance went off with tremendous zest, thanks at times to some resourceful improvisation. In particular, Luke Roberts as Lantern Leatherhead turned technical difficulties during the puppet show to advantage, and made it funnier than ever. Tim Cribb, historian of the Marlowe Society, recalls of the production: ‘It was hilarious, though thrown together in the most hurried way; the standard of improvisation within a general Elizabethan and even Jonsonian idiom was nonetheless high’ (private communication).

In the festival atmosphere, this was not the occasion to explore the play’s subtler and darker tones. As Alex Outhwaite writes: ‘We played the characters as big as we could, aiming for a rambunctious, pacey, laughter-packed extravaganza of exuberance.’ Even so, ‘we managed to develop some well-rounded characters, so that amongst the chaos there were some moments of sweetness, even pathos.’

No troupe is as devoted to Bartholomew Fair as the Marlowe Society. At the time of writing, their fourth production was announced, only seven years after the third. This time, however, it was to be a full-scale production for the ADC Theatre, Cambridge, 9-12 October 2012, to be directed by Harry Michell, the current director of Cambridge Footlights. The cast-list is given at the end of appendix 3.

At the time of writing, the most recent student performance was given by Willing Suspension Productions, a group of graduates who, supported by Boston University and its English Department, specialise in lesser known works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The production at the Agganis Arena Student Theatre in March/April 2011, can be seen in full on YouTube. It is a simple, enthusiastically youthful performance set in the present, with upstage entrances and exits through a huge pig’s head, cheerfully gaping and welcoming. The style is suggested by Zeal-of-the-land Busy, who — in keeping with his ‘violence of singularity’ though not with his religious pretensions — wears a loud check jacket.

Finally, various local amateur companies have been bold enough to tackle such a demanding and idiosyncratic play, often apparently bringing it off with enough success for the production to be recalled even after many years as a high point of the company’s existence. Inevitably, there have also been mishaps. One production opened not only Jonson’s Act 5 with the beating of a drum but also Act 4. One evening the Act 4 cast were slow off the mark and the Act 5 group in rather a hurry, and the action lurched straight from Act 3 into the final act; Quarlous had to improvise a speech summarising the lost action, and the performance ended thirty-five minutes early. On another occasion the actors emerged after the interval to find they were playing to a virtually empty theatre — almost every seat had been taken by a block booking, and the party had decided to leave early.

Much the earliest recorded of these amateur productions was by the City of London Festival Players. This marked the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and made use of the magnificent setting of the Guildhall. Understandably, comedy outweighed satire in this festive performance, which was a showpiece for ‘the pick of the City’s amateur actors’ (The Times, 16 July). Littlewit was good-natured, and Mooncalf ‘good and pathetic’. But there were also ‘actors with big voices and something of the grand manner’, including Stanley Powell as Overdo and Leslie Blythe ‘horridly unctuous and sly’ as Busy.

The 1972 production by Highbury Players at the Highbury Little Theatre, Sutton Coldfield, was also for a festive occasion: the quatercentenary of the author described by the director, Keith Miles, as ‘the greatest unknown comic genius in our drama’. Whimsically, performances ended with a speech in praise of Jonson while the cast hummed ‘Happy Birthday’ in the background. The production enjoyed the advantage of being directed by a prolific and historically informed author (perhaps best known for novels under the name of Edward Marston about an Elizabethan troupe of actors) who also had experience of the professional theatre and had written radio and TV drama. It was performed in period, but with some anachronisms to draw out the timelessness of Jonson’s insights. There was an elegant set by Mary Crompton: ‘There were two tiers of market stalls, a marquee, a couple of very good overhanging signs and it all looked very complicated and extremely colourful. They ought to frame it for posterity’ (Sutton News, 10 November). The stage was small, but the Sutton News reporter found the director able to give the impression of free movement for the large cast, although (as in many productions) sometimes ‘one is distracted by the general hubbub of the crowd’ from attending to a particular character in the foreground.

The New Independent Theatre, of Auckland, New Zealand, needed something spectacular for its opening production at a new venue in May 1979, and the young professional director, John Curry, suggested Bartholomew Fair. He comments: ‘I had directed The Alchemist the year before; I adore puppets and I think the puppet show attracted me. But The Alchemist was child’s play to directing Bartholomew Fair. I was way out of my depth. Even with the experience I now have, I would never attempt such a play. But ignorance was bliss’ (private communication). Nevertheless, others recollect a lively and energetic performance where the party atmosphere of the crowded backstage carried over to the main stage, leaving the audience enchanted though some were rather bewildered. John Curry paid much attention to the balance between foreground and background; he ‘spent time getting us to use our articulators and was particular about clear action, but it meant you had to "act up” when you were the focus, because there was a continuous shuffle and mumble of noise coming from elsewhere in the fair’ (private communication from Bruce de Grut, who played Leatherhead). A degree of finesse was added by using sumptuous costumes hired from a professional company, by using a specialist arranger for the fights, Selwyn Crockett, and an actress of professional experience, Margaret Logan, as Ursula, able to express ineffable contempt for ‘sippers of the city’. Also the seven-year-old Greer Robson, who within months would be a child film star, made her (non-speaking) stage debut as a little girl in the crowd clutching a toy.

Few settings for the play can have been more dramatic and less appropriate than another 1979 production, by Grange Drama Associates at the cliff-top Minack Theatre overlooking the English Channel not far from Land’s End. The sea vista can hardly have been in keeping with the complicated slum built as the set, though it was reviewed on a day of rain and swirling mist. Frank Ruhrmund found the cast tackled the updated text with relish and included a ‘gross and glorious’ Ursula from Daisy May Mulcahy, but the setting was not handled inventively — there was, for example, ‘an intriguing balcony which, unfortunately, is hardly used’ (The Cornishman, 23 August).

In July 1983, at Marble Hill Open Air Theatre, the Richmond Shakespeare Society chose Bartholomew Fair for its forty-fourth — but first non-Shakespearean — outdoor production, supported and publicized by the Greater London Council. It was, reported Tony Howard, ‘an unusually ambitious open-air production played amongst booths and tents, but with the façade of a real neo-classical mansion backing the action to provide an invaluable sense of the ordered, wealthy world so dangerously forsaken by the justices and gentry for the Fair. The pig-woman’s booth boasted a spitted carcase the size of an average horse, Lantern Leatherhead’s puppets were from the George Speaight collection, and the audience could buy drinks and gingerbread-men from hawkers and from stalls’ (1983, 79). There were jugglers, pigs, and a dramatic fire-eater. It proved a popular event, with good attendances overall, even though a cloudburst made one evening a wash-out. Robert Harris found it a very confident production, based on well-developed expertise in managing open-air performances, and amplification meant that the ‘precise, colourful, and astonishingly timeless’ language could all be heard (Richmond and Twickenham Times, 8 July). Tony Howard, however, found the production disappointingly conventional, with the performers at a considerable distance from the audience and the actors having to resort to ‘mincing and drawling, swaggering and belching’. The exception was Wasp: ‘He was a spike-haired and humourless maniac looking for people to insult but unable to see more than a few inches in front of his nose. He seemed to be acting in a world of his own, which was surely right for Jonson, even if it owed something to the company’s inability to achieve any ensemble effects while playing caricatures.’ The production did, even so, ‘create a seductive mood out of canvas, wood, grass, and the warm air’ and suggested that ‘a thoroughgoing environmental production should be mounted by one of the major classical companies’.

One of the most remarkable of amateur performances was by the Questors Theatre, Ealing, London, in 1986. Questors, which presents some twenty shows a year in its two auditoria, claims to be the largest amateur theatre in Europe, with an active membership of 600 and an ‘audience membership’ of about 3,000. John Davey, who has directed for the company several times, based his production on the assertion that ‘the central "character” is the Fair itself’, unchanging while the visitors are re-formed. His project (as recorded on the company’s website) was ‘to involve in one of our productions those Questors members who do not normally have a chance to appear on stage or work behind stage’. As a result as many as seventy-six people were on stage, fifty of whom had not acted before for the company. All Jonson’s parts, down even to Solomon, were filled with scarcely any doubling, and the cast was augmented by over thirty invented and precisely identified parts, such as the Lord Mayor of London, a merchant and his family, a knife grinder, Val Cutting’s girl, Puppy’s family, a fortune-teller, a blind beggar, assorted food-sellers and punks, and a two-person giant of a woman on a man’s shoulders. Again there was hardly any doubling.

Despite the expansion of the cast to re-create the atmosphere of the Fair, Jonson’s text seems to have been treated conservatively. It was not extensively cut, and performances ran for three hours; Nory Vittachi felt that the strict adherence to the original text over such a long play was hard work for the audience (Ealing Gazette, 14 March). Costumes were in period, and while the red-and-white striped canvas of the booths was anachronistic, the Fair, like the costumes, looked lived in rather than merely picturesque, so that it was felt as an authentic re-creation of the Fair. Vittachi recognized the risk of having so many inexperienced actors on stage, but found the crowd scenes (arranged especially by the assistant director, Carol Metcalfe) to be particularly impressive.

Three months later there was another spectacular community event. The Swan Theatre, Worcester — and the people of the city — celebrated the theatre’s twenty-first anniversary with another expansive production. This was the annual large-scale community-theatre project led by ‘Dixon & Dart’, Luke Dixon (formerly of Shared Experience) and Paul Dart, a designer for leading companies such as Shared Experience and the National Theatre. Only the first act, reduced to twenty minutes, was performed in the theatre itself. Like the programme — with its photographs of Twiggy, Harold Wilson, the Beatles, and Peggy Ashcroft laying the theatre’s foundation stone — this act looked back with amused nostalgia to the year of the company’s foundation and set the scene in a parody of a 1965 drawing room. The production then expanded in both place and time: a youthful brass band led the audience out of the theatre onto the Pitchcroft race course across the road for ninety minutes of an outdoor performance where the basic style was loosely Jacobean in the mob caps and long dresses of the female extras, but with no lack of allusions to other periods. The showmen of the Fair, for example, were spivs in exaggeratedly loud outfits. There were sideshows, booths, livestock, music, and fireworks. The puppet play was performed by the Swan Youth Theatre. Inevitably, this was another light-hearted production: photographs include, for example, the Justice jocularly embracing an Ursula who looks sweet and charming; David Ford found a riot of extravagant costumes, colourful backdrops, and extrovert characters (Worcester Evening News, 6 June 1986). He added: ‘The thing is a romp, with the thinnest of storylines, but much overacting and underlined speechifying.’ Rightly or wrongly, he thought it would have fulfilled itself better had it been less of a street-theatre production and more of a pantomime, with the audience encouraged to jeer at the Justice, throw vegetables at the dignitaries in the stocks, and join in the singing and the chases.

Another thriving company, the Norwich Players, performed Bartholomew Fair at their Maddermarket Theatre in 1990. Photographs show the production was colourful and in period. Social distinctions were clearly maintained, so that the puritan women’s outfits were black but sumptuous. The basic set used half-timbered scenery by Nugent Monck intact after almost seventy years, and setting and costumes were picturesque, even when in rags and tatters. The production was seen as a swift-moving, farcical romp (Norwich Mercury and Advertiser, 23 and 30 November). The Berliner Grund Theater production of 1996 was a different but still light-hearted undertaking. The BGT, founded in 1991 for a visit to the Edinburgh Fringe, is a youthful, primarily amateur group that performs in English, putting on one play a year for three weeks in various locations in Berlin. Photographs suggest that the production had very much the feel of a pantomime, with comic exaggeration in the costumes and poses, and with several interpolated comic dances. The setting was basically eighteenth century, but with some modern dress and instruments. Winwife and Quarlous were elegant in white and apricot satin, while Cokes was fantastic in a large, glistening hat with two plumes. The policemen were obviously comic, and even Ursula was almost clean and presentable. The Justice, as Arthur of Bradley, initially emerged out of a waste bin, an odd anticipation of his emergence from a wheelie bin in the RSC production the following year.

Chesil Theatre, a local amateur society at Winchester, presented the play in 2001, in a text slightly adapted by the director, Graham Cranmer. This group performs in the church of St Peter upon Chesulle without Eastgate, which dates from at least the twelfth century, and, as converted, seats an audience of about seventy-five. The audience sat along two sides of the nave, with the stage on two levels across the diagonal. The staging was simple but appropriate, with slender red and turquoise drapes on a black background, and with the medieval pillars and arches incorporated into the upper stage. Light from the west window flooded the stage in the earlier scenes. Costumes were loosely in period and again simple but apt, with a very slatternly Ursula and a striped top for Wasp. The mood of the performance was suggested by having the cast assemble for supper at Justice Overdo’s at the end, before a sudden freeze and blackout. An under-prepared local reviewer praised the performances and hated the play (Hampshire Chronicle, 20 July).

Two productions recent at the time of writing suggest that amateur and inexperienced actors can, with professional guidance, cope successfully with a play as demanding as Bartholomew Fair. The first of these, Castaway Community Theatre, performing in the Aberystwyth Arts Centre Studio Theatre in August 2010, is a professionally run community facility for drama at the Centre that recruits members regardless of experience. There are no auditions; anyone who pays the term’s fees instantly becomes a performer. The production was directed by the overall director of the company, David Blumfield, a tutor in drama at Aberystwyth University, with his colleague from the Education Department, Dr Susan Chapman, guiding the cast through the intricacies of Jonson’s language.

In a private communication, David Blumfield says: ‘After a fairly stressful rehearsal period (some company members have still not forgiven me for choosing this play!) the production played before packed and enthusiastic houses... Crucially I wished to capture the notion of “carnival” juxtaposed with Jonson's biting satire. I wanted an atmosphere of partying, drinking and loudness which would enhance Jonson's exploration of the hypocritical nature of the upper classes, and the earthiness (to the point of vulgarity) of the lower classes. I needed a great English party and the closest thing for me was the so-called "feel good factor" of the nineties — people trying to have a good time when not all is good.’ Consequently the characters wore sometimes outré versions of Nineties fashions, and there was a soundtrack of Brit Pop: Ursula entered to ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ by Oasis and the more laddish characters danced and sang loudly to Blur’s ‘Parklife’. As Johann Gregory notes in a detailed review (Cahiers Élisabéthains, 78 (autumn 2010), 87-89), the eclectic fashions were little concerned to mark social distinctions; for instance, Cokes ‘wore a Caribbean shirt and union-jack shorts made of silk; he also had a Burberry suit jacket, a flat cap and a yellow silk scarf’. The dress and demeanour of the puritanical characters ‘nodded to the rich tradition of the Welsh Nonconformists’ (p. 88).

The review bears out the success of the production, though with the almost inevitable reservation that it was ‘a feel-good production that sweetened some of Jonson’s more biting satire. Setting the play largely in ’90s Britain, with Britpop “classics” of that era such as Blur’s Parklife, meant that the production was often more sentimental than satirical’ (p. 89).

The second recent production bringing together amateur and professional was by the intriguingly named Vile Passéist Theatre, which was founded by its artistic director Don Bray in Toronto in 2009, and soon became established at the small Bus Stop Theatre at Halifax, Nova Scotia. A non-profit company with amateur and professional working together, it specialises in presenting underrated plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and sets itself against the dismissal by the Italian Futurist, Filippo Marinetti, of traditional theatre and any love of the past as ‘vile’ and ‘passéist’. Bray’s favourite word for the play is ‘bizarre’; in his director’s note he relishes the ‘collection of bizarre, memorable, and larger-than-life characters ... a flock of bizarre Englishmen’. This is borne out in photographs of the production, where a set dark and bare apart from the few essential props is the background to a fantastical series of characters and costumes, in a gallimaufry of periods and styles, with continuity from towering headdresses built around birdcages and baskets. Bray himself as Busy, for example, is resplendent in white — a strikingly implausible medley, part pasha, part high priest, part chef. It was also a production full of music, not only traditional airs such as ‘Packington’s Pound’ but also jaunty original music inflected by traditional idiom, composed by Mike Chandler to anonymous lyrics such as ‘A Trip to Kilburn’, ‘The Jolly Brown Turd’, and ‘The Jovial Broom Man’.

Responses to the production suggest it was an exhilarating ordeal. Three and a half noisy hours in a small, overheated theatre tested the audience’s endurance; the vocal style could get rough and the performances could become over-enthusiastic (Stephen Pedersen, The Chronicle Herald, July, 2011). But the performance was also praised for the ‘firm grasp of Jonson’s language’ and the ‘casual, conversational ease’ of the speaking. The quality of some of the performance is suggested by how Jesse Robb as Wasp aroused laughter by standing still, ‘the funniest person on stage while playing a character who seems utterly devoid of sense of humour’ (Amanda Campbell, The Way I See It Theatre Blog, 8 July 2011).

As cited above, reviewing Richard Eyre’s Nottingham production, Ned Chaillet asserted: ‘Producers can’t have it both ways ... and have to opt for seduction or irony.’ They have to win over the audience with farcical though endearing excess — a ploy as seductive to the performer as the audience — or darken the play with Jonson’s loathing of social perversions. This may not be true of the most accomplished professional groups — Laurence Boswell’s RSC production managed both to delight and disgust, for example. But it seems inevitable that amateur and semi-professional groups working with the deeply ambiguous plenitude of such a text will aim to seduce the audience through gusto and high spirits. Though it may be a partial response, it does refresh the enthusiasm and delight aroused by Jonson’s comedy, even after 400 years.

***

APPENDIX 1

BARTHOLOMEW FAIR : A CALENDAR OF PERFORMANCES, 1661-1735

Date	Company	Theatre	Cast-list
8 June 1661	King’s Company	Vere Street Theatre
27 June 1661	" "	" " "
7 September 1661	" "	" " "
12 November 1661	" "	" " "
18 December 1661	" "	" " "
2 August 1664	" "	Bridges St Theatre, Drury Lane
27 April 1667	" "	" " "
4 September 1668	" "	" " "
22 February 1669	" "	Cockpit, Whitehall
26 December 1670		Theatre Royal, Smock Alley, Dublin
30 November 1674	" "	Theatre Royal, (second) Drury Lane Theatre
3 June 1702	Patent company, under Christopher Rich	Drury Lane
18 August 1702	" "	" "
25 March 1704	" "	" "
8 April 1704	" "	" "
28 September 1704	" "	" "
8 January 1705	" "	" "
12 August 1707	Company under John Vanbrugh	Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket	See Appendix 2
13 August1707	" "	" " "
22 August 1707	" "	" " "
22 October 1707	" "	" " "	App. 2
15 July 1708	Company under Wilks, Cibber, Estcourt	Drury Lane Theatre	App. 2
26 August 1708	" "	" " "
31 August 1708	" "	" " "	App. 2
1 June 1710	Company under Owen Swiney	Queen’s Theatre	App. 2
8 March 1711	Company under Swiney, Wilks, Cibber, Doggett	Drury Lane	App. 2
24 August 1711	Company under Wilks, Cibber, Doggett	" "	App. 2
26 August 1712	" "	" "	App. 2
14 January 1713	" "	" "	App. 2
1 December 1713	Company under Wilks, Cibber, Booth	" "
28 June 1715	" "	" "	App. 2
10 December 1716	" "	" "
16 July 1717	" "	" "	App. 2
24 March 1718	" "	" "	App. 2
27 June 1718	" "	" "	App. 2
26 November 1718	" "	" "	App. 2
28 April 1719	" "	" "
4 August 1719	" "	" "	App. 2
13 January 1720	" "	" "	App. 2
10 June 1720	" "	" "	App. 2
22 August 1720	" "	" "
31 October 1720	" "	" "
10 July 1722	" "	" "
21 December 1722	" "	" "
30 October 1731	" "	" "	App. 2
25 August 1735		Lincoln’s Inn Fields	App. 2

Note: information in Appendices 1 and 2 is drawn largely from: The London Stage, 1660-1800, part 1, 1660-1700, ed. William Van Lennep (Carbondale, Ill., 1965); part 2, 1700-1729, ed. Emmett L. Avery (1960); and part 3, 1729-1747, ed. Arthur H. Scouten (1961), from a draft revision of The London Stage for 1700-1711, ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (in progress, 1996), and from Kalman A. Burnim, Philip H. Highfill, and Edward A. Langhans (eds.), A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800 (Carbondale, Ill., 1973-)

APPENDIX 2

BARTHOLOMEW FAIR : CAST LISTS, 1707-35

Date	Littlewit	Win	Purecraft	Busy	Winwife	Quarlous	Cokes
12.8.1707 13.8.1707-22.8.1707	Henry Norris	—	Mary Powell	George Pack	Benjamin Husband	John Mills	William Bullock
22.10.1707	"	Margaret Saunders	"	Colley Cibber	"	"	"
15.7.1708	"	"	"	Pack	John Bickerstaff	"	"
31.8.1708	"	"	"	Bickerstaff	Husband	George Powell	"
1.6.1710	William Bowen	"	"	Cibber	"	Mills	"
8.3.1711	Norris	"	—	"	"	"	"
24.8.1711	"	"	Powell	Pack	Thomas Elrington	"	"
26.8.1712	"	"	—	"	—	"	"
14.1.1713	"	"	—	"	—	"	"
28.6.1715	"	"	—	Bickerstaff	James Quin	"	Josias Miller
16.7.1717	"	—	—	"	?Quin	"	"
24.3.1718	"	Saunders	—	Cibber	—	"	"
27.6.1718	"	—	—	Bickerstaff	Robert Wilks	"	"
26.11.1718	"	Saunders	—	Cibber	—	"	"
4.8.1719	"	—	—	Bickerstaff	—	"	"
13.1.1720	"	Saunders	Katherine Baker	"	William Wilks	"	"
10.6.1720	"	"	"	"	"	"	"
30.10.1731	James Oates	Kitty Raftor	Elizabeth Wetherilt	Benjamin Griffin	Plesaunce Watson	William Mills	Theophilus Cibber
25.8.1735	—	—	—	—	—	—	William Mullart

	Wasp	Overdo	Mrs Overdo	Grace	Edgworth	Nightingale	Ursula
12.8.1707 14.8.1707-22.8.1707	Benjamin Johnson	Theophilus Keene	—	Mary Porter	Barton Booth	Henry Fairbank	Richard Cross
22.10.17071	"	"	—	?Lucretia Bradshaw	"	"	"
15.7.1708	"	"	Margaret Mills	Henrietta Moore	"	"	"
31.8.1708	"	"	Susannah Cox	"	John Thurmond	"	Cross
1.6.1710	"	—	—	Elizabeth Willis	—	John Boman	—
8.3.1711	"	—	—	"	Christopher Bullock	—	—
24.8.1711	"	—	—	"	"	Matthew Birkhead	Cross
26.8.1712	"	—	—	—	—	—	—
14.1.1713	"	—	—	Willis	C. Bullock	—	—
28.6.1715	"	Charles Shepard	—	"	Lacy Ryan	Birkhead	Cross
16.7.1717	"	—	—	—	"	—	"
24.3.1718	"	—	—	Willis	—	—	Francis Leigh
27.6.1718	"	—	—	—	Thomas Walker	—	—
26.11.1718	"	—	—	Willis	—	—	—
4.8.1719	"	—	—	—	—	—	—
13.1.1720	"	Shepard	Henrietta Moore	—	Walker	—	Cross
10.6.1720	"	"	"	—	"	—	"
30.10.1731	"	"	Frances Shireburn	Elizabeth Butler	Adam Hallam	Charles Stoppelaer	John Harper
25.8.1735	Mr Jones	James Lacy	Elizabeth Bennet	—	—	—	—

APPENDIX 3

MODERN PRODUCTIONS

26-7 June 1921: Phoenix Society, New Theatre, Oxford

John Littlewit	Eric Cowley
Solomon	Gordon Allison
Win Littlewit	Angela Baddeley
Dame Purecraft	Margaret Yarde
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Ben Field
Winwife	Tristan Rawson
Quarlous	Howard Rose
Bartholomew Cokes	Ernest Thesiger
Humphrey Wasp	Stanley Lathbury
Adam Overdo	Frank Cellier
Dame Overdo	Helena Millais
Grace Wellborn	Clare Harris
Lantern Leatherhead	Henry Kiell Ayliff
Joan Trash	Elsie French
Ezekiel Edgworth	Edward Combermere
Nightingale	John Clifford
Ursula	Roy Byford
Mooncalf	Edwin Greenwood
Jordan Knockem	Eugene Leahy
Captain Whit	Richard Grenville
Punk Alice	Silvia Young
Troubleall	Edwin Greenwood
Watchmen	J. Adrian Byrne, Frederick Harker, Percy H. Vernon
Costermonger	Stanley Hughes
Tinderbox man	J. Adrian Byrne
Doorkeepers	Gordon Allison, Stanley Hughes
Stage-keeper	Percy H. Vernon
Book-holder	Frederick Harker
Scrivener	Allan Wade
Director	Allan Wade
Designer	Norman Wilkinson
Music	John Greenwood

30 April 1940: Players’ Club, Bryn Mawr College, Penn.

The list below is based on the cast as announced a month before the performance, incorporating such changes as are known to have been made later.

John Littlewit	Anne Ruth Goldberg
Win Littlewit	Marion Kirk
Dame Purecraft	Eleanor Fribley
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Vivi French
Winwife	Louisa Horton
Quarlous	Madge Lazo
Bartholomew Cokes	Natalie Bell
Humphrey Wasp	Mary Alice Sturdevant
Adam Overdo	Susan Miller
Dame Overdo	Nancy Evarts
Grace Wellborn	Patty McKnew
Lantern Leatherhead	Nancy Chase
Joan Trash	Carolyn Garnett
Ezekiel Edgworth	Pennell Crosby
Ursula	Julie Follansbee
Mooncalf	Elizabeth Frazier
Jordan Knockem	Mary Kate Wheeler
Punk Alice	Phyllis White
Troubleall	Peggy Copeland
Bristle	Barbara Auchincloss
Haggis	Hermione Frank
Prologue	Eleanor Emery
Dumb show	Misses Rehrig, Young, Greeley

11-15 March 1947: Marlowe Dramatic Society, Arts Theatre, Cambridge

John Littlewit	Philip Collins
Win Littlewit	Elizabeth Cunningham
Dame Purecraft	Gillian Webb
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	John Money
Winwife	Douglas Eves
Quarlous	Arnold Edinborough
Bartholomew Cokes	John Sleap
Humphrey Wasp	Ross Lewis
Adam Overdo	N. Forward
Dame Overdo	Stella Forwood
Grace Wellborn	Margaret Dewhirst
Lantern Leatherhead	John Myers
Joan Trash	June Hooper
Ezekiel Edgworth	M. Manton
Nightingale	C. Parker
Ursula	Elvira Evans
Mooncalf	D. Pocock
Jordan Knockem	Stephen Joseph
Val Cutting	John Carthy
Captain Whit	Anthony Knowles
Punk Alice	Sylvia Clark
Troubleall	E. Junge
Director	Donald Beves
Designer	Pat Robertson

18-19 January 1949: BBC Third Programme broadcast

John Littlewit	Ronald Simpson
Win Littlewit	Betty Linton
Dame Purecraft	Gladys Young
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Esmé Percy
Winwife	Derek Birch
Quarlous	James McKechnie
Bartholomew Cokes	Cyril Cusack
Humphrey Wasp	John Laurie
Adam Overdo	Oliver Burt
Dame Overdo	Barbara Trevor
Grace Wellborn	June Spencer
Lantern Leatherhead	John Slater
Joan Trash	Pat Hayes
Ezekiel Edgworth	Douglas Seale
Nightingale	Dudley Jones
Ursula	Nan Marriott-Watson
Mooncalf	Frank Atkinson
Jordan Knockem	Ralph Truman
Captain Whit	Harry Hutchinson
Troubleall	Deryck Guyler
Bristle	Roger Snowdon
Haggis	Raf de la Torre
Stage-keeper	Richard George
Adapter and director	R. D. Smith
Music composed by	Elizabeth Lutyens
conducted by	Edward Clark

 

21 August-9 September 1950: Old Vic Company, Assembly Hall, Edinburgh Festival

John Littlewit	Anthony Van Bridge
Win Littlewit	Dorothy Tutin
Dame Purecraft	Dorothy Green
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Mark Dignam
Winwife	John Van Eyssen
Quarlous	Esmond Knight
Bartholomew Cokes	Robert Eddison
Humphrey Wasp	Alec Clunes
Adam Overdo	Roger Livesey
Dame Overdo	Ursula Jeans
Grace Wellborn	Heather Stannard
Lantern Leatherhead	Pierre Lefevre
Joan Trash	Sheila Ballantine
Ezekiel Edgworth	Paul Hansard
Nightingale	Leo M’Kern (later McKern)
Ursula	Nuna Davey
Mooncalf	Brian Smith
Jordan Knockem	William Devlin
Val Cutting	James Grout
Captain Whit	Douglas Wilmer
Troubleall	Paul Rogers
Bristle	Rupert Davies
Haggis	Peter Duguid
Costermonger	Lee Montague
Mousetrap-man	James Grout
Corn-cutter	Leonard Maley
Nordern	James Wellman
Puppy	Richard Walter
Sharkwell	Richard Walter
Filcher	James Wellman
Puppeteers	George Speaight, Leonard Maley
Stage-keeper	Paul Rogers
Book-holder	Richard Pasco
Scrivener	Peter Duguid
Other parts played by	Jan Bashford, Christopher Burgess, Jean Cooke, Sheila Cooper, Patience Gee, Bernard Kay, Michael Keir, Leonard Maley, Joan Poulter, Elizabeth Rogers, Rex Robinson
Director	George Devine
Scenery/costumes	MOTLEY
Puppet show arranger	George Speaight
Music composed by	Jani Strasser
Lighting	Cecil Clarke

18 December 1950-13 January 1951 and 17-23 May 1951: Old Vic Company, Old Vic Theatre, London

The cast was as for Edinburgh except for the following:

Winwife	John Ebdon
Quarlous	Douglas Wilmer
Grace Wellborn	Pauline Jameson
Captain Whit	John Blatchley
Watchmen	Leonard Maley, Bernard Kay, Rex Robinson
Barber	George Speaight
Other parts were played by the same actors as in Edinburgh (excluding Jean Cooke) plus:	Margaret Chisholm, Ray Jessop, Hugh Lund, Brian Matthew, Lee Montague, John Moore, John Walker, Pamela Wickington, Mary Wylie
Orchestra director	Harold Ingram
Fights arranger	Charles Alexis

1951: Festival d’Arras (devant l’hôtel de ville), Arras, France

Mise en scène .

André Reybas.

26-7 September 1952: Dunedin Teachers’ College, Wallace Hall, Dunedin, New Zealand

Director

Jean Ballard

July 1953: Guildhall City of London Festival Players, Guildhall

John Littlewit	Frank Cernic
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Leslie Blythe
Bartholomew Cokes	Philip Cook
Adam Overdo	Stanley Powell
Ursula	Heaven Fitzgerald
Mooncalf	Terence Muckleston
Director	Robin Rook

November 1955: Amateur Dramatic Club, Cambridge University, ADC Theatre, Cambridge

John Littlewit	Charles Stallard
Win Littlewit	Toni Drabble
Dame Purecraft	Ann Carter
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Robin Chapman
Winwife	Christopher Renard
Quarlous	Brian Batchelor
Bartholomew Cokes	Daniel Massey
Humphrey Wasp	John Bird
Adam Overdo	David Buck
Dame Overdo	Judith Morris
Grace Wellborn	Christine Baker
Lantern Leatherhead	Henry Burke
Joan Trash	Angela Holder
Ezekiel Edgworth	Tom Fairhead
Nightingale	John Pickles
Ursula	Pamela Srawley
Troubleall	Jonathan Miller
Director	Robin Midgley
Designer	Nigel Whittaker

27 July-1 August 1959: Oxford University Experimental Theatre Club, University Open Air Theatre Festival, Avonbank Gardens, Stratford-upon-Avon

John Littlewit	Adrian Petch
Win Littlewit	Pat O’Callaghan
Dame Purecraft	Margaret Vernon
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Keith Dawson
Winwife	Bryan Stonehouse
Quarlous	Philip Wilkinson
Bartholomew Cokes	Denis Moriarty
Humphrey Wasp	Adrian Brine
Adam Overdo	Peter Holmes
Dame Overdo	Elisabeth Bosworth
Grace Wellborn	Caroline Seebohm
Lantern Leatherhead	Eddie Gilbert
Joan Trash	Susan Forrester
Ezekiel Edgworth	Martin Bowley
Nightingale	Dudley Moore
Ursula	Romola Christopherson
Mooncalf	Jonathan Cecil
Jordan Knockem	Kenneth Loach
Val Cutting	Glyn Worsnip
Captain Whit	Oliver Davies
Punk Alice	Hazel-Ann Plumer
Troubleall	Jonathan Cecil
Bristle	David Vere-Jones
Haggis	Michael Billington
Nordern	Edmund Fisher
Puppy	William Aaron
Sharkwell	John Bailey
Filcher	William Aaron
Directors	David Webster, Kenneth Loach
Designer	Diana Hughes
Music by	Herbert Chappell, Dudley Moore

28 November-1 December 1962: MUSKET [Michigan Union Show, Ko-Eds Too], Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre, University of Michigan

A ‘new musical fantasy’, ‘based on Ben Jonson’s comic masterpiece’, book and lyrics by Jack O’Brien, music by Bob James, sung by Tom Jennings, Marcia Katz, Judy Heric, and Carl Schurr. (Copy in Bowling Green State University Library.)

4-19 January 1963: the Sunken Garden, University of Western Australia, the Graduate Dramatic Society,

Director

John Tasker

1963: Gate Theatre, Dublin, the Dublin University Players

15-20 March 1965: Downstage, University Memorial Theatre, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand

John Littlewit	Victor Webb
Win Littlewit	Irene Esam
Dame Purecraft	Treena Kerr
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Peter Bland
Winwife	Ken Blackburn
Quarlous	Tim Eliott
Bartholomew Cokes	Ian Mune
Humphrey Wasp	Kevin Woodill
Adam Overdo	Martyn Sanderson
Dame Overdo	Elizabeth Booth
Grace Wellborn	Raeburn Hirsch
Lantern Leatherhead	Brian Cashin
Joan Trash	Hilary Waring
Ezekiel Edgworth	Neil Rowe
Nightingale	Maarten van Dijk
Ursula	Anne Flannery
Mooncalf	Russell Campbell
Jordan Knockem	Alex Trousdell
Val Cutting	Russell Duncan
Captain Whit	Harry Lavington
Troubleall	Lewis Rowbotham
Bristle	Richard Cathie
Haggis	Stephen Whitehouse
Puppy	Ross Jamieson
Puppets	Les Cleveland, Don McKenzie, Craig McLeod
Director	Roger Savage
Designer	Bruce Woods
Costumes	David Graves, Jean Williams, Helen Seresin
Puppet makers	Raymond and Geraldine Boyce

18-22 May 1965: Manchester University Stage Society, Renold Theatre, Manchester College of Science and Technology

John Littlewit	Ian Duncan
Win Littlewit	Phoebe Corrall
Dame Purecraft	Pamela Ridge
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Tony Ridge
Winwife	Ray Barron
Quarlous	Arnold Hinchliffe
Bartholomew Cokes	Paul Seed
Humphrey Wasp	David Marks
Adam Overdo	Leslie Jones
Dame Overdo	Jill Nelson
Grace Wellborn	Jill Truman
Lantern Leatherhead	Brian McEwen
Joan Trash	Mary Burns
Ezekiel Edgworth	Paul Webster
Nightingale	Bob Jamieson
Ursula	Liz Humphreys
Mooncalf	Bernard Boland
Jordan Knockem	David Rebbitt
Val Cutting	Cris Gariff
Captain Whit	Niall Jackson
Punk Alice	Barbara Sykes
Troubleall	Michael Smith
Bristle	David Crossfield
Haggis	Geoff Grant
Poacher	Michael Barnes
Costermonger	Marilyn Beesley
Nordern	Tony Lynch
Sharkwell	David Kaye
Filcher	Robert Kellett
Stallkeepers	Diana Machen, Anne Parkinson
Passengers	Carmel McManmon, Lyn Boland, Alvis Bennett, Avis Wassel, Margery Gill
Director	Ron Stannard
Designer	John Seed
Lighting	Bertrand Quesnel

10-14 May 1966: Dartmouth Players, the Hopkins Center Theatre, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

John Littlewit	Robert Morgan
Solomon	Kari Prager
Win Littlewit	Lynne Potts
Dame Purecraft	Joanne Pomeroy
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Stephen Coy
Winwife	Philip Basquin
Quarlous	Bruce Lawder
Bartholomew Cokes	Arthur Fergensen
Humphrey Wasp	Jerry Zaks
Adam Overdo	Michael Mickelsen
Dame Overdo	Alice Young
Grace Wellborn	Claudia Slade
Lantern Leatherhead	Andrew Barrie
Joan Trash	Arlene Bell
Ezekiel Edgworth	Allan Ackerman
Nightingale	Robert Montgomery
Ursula	Alice Weymouth
Mooncalf	Bruce Hamilton
Jordan Knockem	Bruce Pacht
Val Cutting	Bruce Berry
Captain Whit	Robert Reich
Punk Alice	Beth Hamilton
Troubleall	Glen Kilpatrick
Bristle	Don Marcus
Haggis	John Pendleton
Poacher	Bradford Stein
Costermonger	Robert Gippin
Tinderbox man	Steven Spitz
Nordern	Ralph Cohen
Puppy	Richard Eberhart
Sharkwell	Monroe Denton
Filcher	Steven Spitz
Passengers	Ann Seibert, Carol Mace, Lauren and Marko Watkins, Jamie Connolly, Jefrey Pond
Director	James H. Clancy
Assistant director	Bradford Stein
Designer	George W. Schoenhut
Costume designer	Alicia Annas

From 21 July 1966: St Paul’s and St John’s Colleges, University of Sydney, at the 21 st Inter-Varsity Drama Festival, University of Queensland, Brisbane

Wasp	Charles Zara
Ursula	Wanda Romaine
Director	Brian Donovan

30 August-25 September 1966: Bristol Old Vic, Little Theatre, Bristol

John Littlewit	Gawn Grainger
Win Littlewit	Pamela Buckle
Dame Purecraft	Julia McCarthy
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Arthur Blake
Winwife	Stephen Fagan
Quarlous	Matthew Roberton
Bartholomew Cokes	Christopher Serle
Humphrey Wasp	John White
Adam Overdo	Frank Middlemass
Dame Overdo	Marjorie Yates
Grace Wellborn	Joan Morrow
Lantern Leatherhead	Gary Files
Joan Trash	Janet Key
Ezekiel Edgworth	Colin McCormack
Ursula	Claire Davenport
Mooncalf	Charles McKeown
Jordan Knockem	Roger Bizley
Val Cutting	Philip Taylor
Captain Whit	Desmond Stokes
Punk Alice	Janet Key
Troubleall	Charles McKeown
Bristle	Gabriel Prendergast
Haggis	Richard Glyn Lewis
Costermonger	Richard Glyn Lewis
Porters/puppeteers	Sally Barling, Michael Grensted
Director	Christopher Denys
Designers	Graham Barlow, Michael Swindlehurst

30 August-17 September 1966: National Youth Theatre, Royal Court Theatre, London

John Littlewit	Leslie Robarts
Solomon	Ian Ward
Win Littlewit	Nicola Barlow
Dame Purecraft	Pat Heal
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Roger Phillips
Winwife	Perran Penrose
Quarlous	David Taylor
Bartholomew Cokes	Trevor Adams
Humphrey Wasp	Gareth Armstrong
Adam Overdo	David Stockton
Dame Overdo	Georgina Trentham
Grace Wellborn	Nicola Maltin
Lantern Leatherhead	James Gibson
Joan Trash	Veronica Sowerby
Ezekiel Edgworth	David Suchet
Nightingale	Richard Lewis
Ursula	Gwynneth Powell
Mooncalf	Duncan Woodcock
Jordan Knockem	Ian Clegg
Val Cutting	Henry Murray
Captain Whit	Richard Knott
Punk Alice	Linda Burns
Troubleall	John Olive
Bristle	John Harding
Haggis	Vaughan Moll
Poacher	Gareth Thomas
Nordern	Barrie Rutter
Puppy	Geoffrey Bullen
Sharkwell	Ray Faulkner
Filcher	Peter Stokes
Tradesmen, citizens, etc.	Andrea Addison, Andrew Branch, Judith Campbell-Smith, Esta Charkham, John Foley, Marilyn Fridjohn, Andrew Hardman, David Kirk, John Labanowski, Roderick Leyland, Mark Powell, Alan Marmion, Michael Myerson, Ian Redford.
Director	Paul Hill
Assistant director	Henry Murray
Designer	Christopher Lawrence
Lighting	Geoffrey Reeves with John Brown
Fights	Ian McKay

21 June 1968: BBC Third Programme

John Littlewit	David Brierley
Win Littlewit	Carol Marsh
Dame Purecraft	Elizabeth Morgan
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Charles Gray
Winwife	Denys Hawthorne
Bartholomew Cokes	Robert Eddison
Humphrey Wasp	Carleton Hobbs
Adam Overdo	John Justin
Dame Overdo	Betty Hardy
Grace Wellborn	Rosalind Shanks
Lantern Leatherhead	Ronald Herdman
Joan Trash	Barbara Mitchell
Ezekiel Edgworth	Anthony Jackson
Nightingale	Alan Dudley
Ursula	Norah Blaney
Mooncalf	Geoffrey Wincott
Jordan Knockem	Francis de Wolff
Punk Alice	Elizabeth Morgan
Bristle	Ian Thompson
Haggis	Duncan McIntyre
Costermonger	Peter Baldwin
Mousetrap man	Christopher Bidmead
Corn-cutter	Antony Viccars
Sharkwell	Christopher Bidmead
Filcher	Antony Viccars
Stage-keeper	Ian Thompson
Book-holder	Peter Baldwin
Adapted and directed by	Raymond Raikes

2 and 5-9 August 1969: Adelaide University Drama Society, Union Hall, Adelaide University, Australia

John Littlewit	John Edge
Solomon	Iain Ross
Win Littlewit	Violetta Vanagas
Dame Purecraft	Helen Mills
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Colin Pearce
Winwife	Michael Smith
Quarlous	Axel Hertz
Bartholomew Cokes	Jonathon Gillis
Humphrey Wasp	Andrew Cannon
Adam Overdo	Peter Meredith
Dame Overdo	Jo Jordan
Grace Wellborn	Jan Saies
Lantern Leatherhead	Geoff Crowhurst
Joan Trash	Carol Williams
Ezekiel Edgworth	Dick Whitington
Nightingale	Chris Bailey
Ursula	Roz Ramsay
Mooncalf	Iain Ross
Jordan Knockem	George Krushni
Val Cutting	Brian Moore
Captain Whit	James Swanson
Punk Alice	Rita Devetzidis
Troubleall	Patrick Frost
Bristle	Neil Lean
Haggis	Peter Wilson
Poacher	Peter Holdcroft
Costermonger	Iain Ross
Nordern	Chris Swain
Puppy	Rick Brown
Sharkwell	Constantine Michaelides
Filcher	John Harm
Censor	Rick Brown
Director	Colin Pearce
Assistant director	Lyn Pitcher
Designer	Clare Robertson
Costume design	Janet Bridgland
Music	Carol Williams

From 30 October 1969: Royal Shakespeare Company, Aldwych Theatre, London

John Littlewit	Terrence Hardiman
Win Littlewit	Helen Mirren
Dame Purecraft	Patience Collier
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Willoughby Goddard
Winwife	Ben Kingsley
Quarlous	Norman Rodway
Bartholomew Cokes	Alan Howard
Humphrey Wasp	Clifford Rose
Adam Overdo	Sebastian Shaw
Dame Overdo	Hildegard Neil
Grace Wellborn	Domini Blythe
Lantern Leatherhead	Patrick Stewart
Joan Trash	Ruby Head
Ezekiel Edgworth	John Kane
Nightingale	Bernard Lloyd
Ursula	Lila Kaye
Mooncalf	Ralph Cotterill
Jordan Knockem	Richard Moore
Val Cutting	Julian Curry
Captain Whit	Bruce Myers
Punk Alice	Mary Rutherford
Troubleall	Philip Manikum
Bristle	Ted Valentine
Haggis	George Cormack
Poacher	Richard Jones Barry
Costermonger	John York
Corn-cutter	David Stern
Mousetrap-man	David Sadgrove
Nordern	Ian Dyson
Puppy	Hugh Keays Byrne
Filcher	Glynne Lewis
Sharkwell	Robert Oates
Stage-keeper	John Kane
Book-holder	Richard Jones Barry
Scrivener	Julian Curry
Other parts played by:	Paul Arlington, Martin Bax, Peter Cochran, David Forbes, Peter Harlowe, Valerie Minifie, Stephen Turner, and (children) David and Stephen Papworth, Paul Swift.
Director	Terry Hands
Designer	Timothy O’Brien
Music	Guy Woolfenden
Puppet adviser	Barry Smith

30 November-19 December 1970: Tyneside Theatre Company, Newcastle University Theatre, Haymarket, Newcastle-on-Tyne

John Littlewit	David Courtland
Bartholomew Cokes	Tim Preece
Humphrey Wasp	Peter Hill
Adam Overdo	Norman Scace
Ursula	Veronica Clifford
Director	Ann Stutfield
Designer	Richard Pickett

April 1972: Deutsches Nationaltheater, Weimar

Director

Fritz Bennewitz

7-18 November 1972: Highbury Players, Highbury Little Theatre, Sutton Coldfield

John Littlewit	Brian Hill
Win Littlewit	Denise Beetlestone
Dame Purecraft	Margaret Raybould
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Alan Williams
Winwife	Clive Cook
Quarlous	Robert Sparks
Bartholomew Cokes	Robert Phillips
Humphrey Wasp	Reg Tolley
Adam Overdo	Philip Landreth
Dame Overdo	Peta English
Grace Wellborn	Estella Hindley
Lantern Leatherhead	Margaret Williams
Joan Trash	Beryl Chubb
Ezekiel Edgworth	Michael Mitchell
Nightingale	Lynda Holmes
Ursula	Constance Grainger
Mooncalf	Beryl Young
Jordan Knockem	Peter Cooley
Captain Whit	Noel Sherwood
Punk Alice	Jean O’Connor
Troubleall	Christopher Harris
Haggis	Nicholas Walker
Poacher	Sue Maddocks
Costermonger	Helen Pinch
Puppy	Frank Gregory
Sharkwell	Sue Fenoughty
Filcher	Valerie Cattell
	Frania Reeves
	Jennifer Senior
Children	Angela and Michael Agnew, Sarah and Tessa Fenoughty, Jennifer and Sarah Landreth, Helena Miles, Martine Tolley, Catherine and Matthew Young
Director	Keith Miles
Designer	Mary Crompton
Costumes	Peta English

1972-3 season: Folger Theatre Group, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

John Littlewit	Richard DeFabees
Win Littlewit	Joy Cocchiola
Dame Purecraft	Bonnie Horan
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Earle Edgerton
Winwife	Michael Sears
Quarlous	John Calkins
Bartholomew Cokes	Eugene Kallman
Humphrey Wasp	Herman O. Arbeit
Adam Overdo	Stuart Pankin
Dame Overdo	Licia Colombi
Grace Wellborn	Stephanie Kurz
Lantern Leatherhead	Kene Holliday
Joan Trash	Bobo Bates
Ezekiel Edgworth	Raynor Scheine
Nightingale	Gerald Holmes
Ursula	Barbara Meyer
Mooncalf	Oliver Cole
Jordan Knockem	Jamal Aduo
Val Cutting	Franz Jones
Captain Whit	Michael Henderson
Punk Alice	Angelina Dahmer
Troubleall	Thomas Busch
Bristle	Timothy Christie
Poacher	Jay Dickson
Costermonger	F. T. Clark
Puppy	Dave Musselman
Filcher	Pat Karpen
Puppets	Bobo Bates, Angelina Dahmer, Billy Davis, Jr., Franz Jones, Pat Karpen, Cathy Paine
Fair folk	Cathy Paine, Billy Davis, Jr.
Director	Robert Mandel
Designer	William G. Mickley, Jr.
Costume designer	Juliellen Weiss
Lighting	Jack Carr
Composer	Robert Dennis

26-31 May 1975: Oxford University Experimental Theatre Club and Magdalen Players, Deer Park, Magdalen College, Oxford

John Littlewit	Sean Spence
Win Littlewit	Sara Jones
Dame Purecraft	Linzi Richardson
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	David Poore
Winwife	Jamie Clay
Quarlous	Steve Dace
Bartholomew Cokes	Charles Irving-Swift
Humphrey Wasp	Nigel Westbrook
Adam Overdo	Peter Bernhard
Dame Overdo	Sarah Pethybridge
Grace Wellborn	Sarah Woodward
Lantern Leatherhead	Bill Buffery
Joan Trash	Jayne Tree
Ezekiel Edgworth	Nick Jose
Nightingale	Jonathan Colchester
Ursula	Emma Bullard
Mooncalf	Peter Mack
Jordan Knockem	Robert Meteyard
Val Cutting	Guy Pilch
Captain Whit	David Profumo
Punk Alice	Avril Bryans
Troubleall	Martin Pleiner
Bristle	Malcolm Webster
Haggis	Steve O’Brien
Poacher and Costermonger	John Boteler
Corn-cutter	Tony Cohen
Nordern	Patrick Feeley
Sharkwell	Tony Cohen
Filcher	Nick Reeve
Passengers	Mary Paul, Murray Edmond, Jon Darvill
	Sarah Tree
Stage-keeper	Malcolm Webster
Book-holder	Patrick Feeley
Scrivener	Nick Reeve
Director	Mark Holloway
Co-director	Bella Wallace
Producer	Tony Cohen
Designer	Sarah Newman
Music composed by	Bill Murphy

5-9 August 1975: Theatre in the Park, Bracknell Arts Centre, in the grounds of South Hill Park, Bracknell, Berks.

Bartlemy Fair , an adaptation by Roger Savage

Jonathan Littlewit	David Stafford
Win-the-fight Littlewit	Deborah Findlay
Widow Purecraft	Jean Palmer
Pastor Busy	John Martlew
Edward Winwife, Esq,	David Childs
Tom Quarlous, Esq.	Dave O’Donnell
Master Bart Cox	Christopher Masters
Humphrey (‘Humpty’) Wasp, B.A.	Allan Brooker
Adam Overdo, Esq., J.P.	John Bromley
Alice Overdo	Maggie Lewis
Grace Wellbourne	Biddy Ashburn
Leatherhead	Stephen Ley
Joan Trash	Tina Glover
Zeke (Edgworth)	Roland Denning
Nightingale	Peter Stark
Madame Ursula	Marian Childs
Moon Calf	Chris Heuvel
‘Lord’ Daniel Jordan	Chris Pettitt
Val Cutting	Mike Butcher
Captain Whit	Owen Kirton
Little Alice	Susie Medley
Poor Troubleall	Gus Garside
P.C. David Bristle	Paul Dunderdale
Supt. Toby Haggis	John Cumming
Norden	Derek Matthews
Puppy	Joe Terry
Director	John Cumming
Assistant directors	Roger Savage, Clare Higney
Music, composed by	Mike Westbrook
played by	Mike Westbrook All-Star Brass Band
Design	Julie Feedam, Derek Matthews
Staging	Pete Hall, Richard Knight
Puppet shows	Tina Glover, Derek Matthews

From 10 June 1976: Nottingham Players, Nottingham Playhouse

John Littlewit	Roger Booth
Win Littlewit	Judy Liebert
Dame Purecraft	Pat Keen
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Malcolm Storry
Winwife	Chris Langham
Quarlous	John Dicks
Bartholomew Cokes	David Beames
Humphrey Wasp	Matthew Scurfield
Adam Overdo	Roger Hume
Dame Overdo	Grania Hayes
Grace Wellborn	Celia Foxe
Lantern Leatherhead	Ted Richards
Joan Trash	Carolyn Pickles
Ezekiel Edgworth	Sylveste McCoy
Nightingale	Andy Andrews
Ursula	Arthur Kohn
Mooncalf	Chris Lillicrap
Jordan Knockem	Ken Campbell
Captain Whit	Eugene Geasley
Punk Alice	Judy Riley
Troubleall	Ralph Nossek
Bristle	Duncan Faber
Haggis, Nordern	Nigel Bennett
Costermonger, Filcher	Kostakis Theodossiou
Whores	Jane Gurnett, Julia Watson
Puppeteers	Duncan Faber, Chris Lillicrap, Sylveste McCoy
Children:	Matthew Bates, Justine Butler, Adam and Andrew Crevald, Andrew Dixon, Peter and Stephen Mersereau, Barnaby and Miranda Pitt, Ben and Luke Silburn
Director	Richard Eyre
Designer	Pamela Howard
Lighting	Geoffrey Mersereau
Assistant Director	Richard H. Williams
Puppet Master	Barry Smith

8-12 March 1977: Marlowe Dramatic Society, Cambridge Arts Theatre

John Littlewit	Roy Weskin
Win Littlewit	Tessa Wojtczak
Dame Purecraft	Sandra Billington
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Paul Shepherd
Winwife	Jon James
Quarlous	Gordon Hammersley
Bartholomew Cokes	Simon Griffith
Humphrey Wasp	Paul Hudson
Adam Overdo	Alan Barker
Dame Overdo	Dawn Ellis
Grace Wellborn	Kate Buffery
Lantern Leatherhead	Chris Keightley
Joan Trash	Carrie Simcocks
Ezekiel Edgworth	Richard Norman
Nightingale	Trevor Barnes
Ursula	Jan Ravens
Mooncalf	Mike Lumsden
Jordan Knockem	Jimmy Mulville
Val Cutting	Dave Hughes
Captain Whit	Richard Turner
Punk Alice	Jane Heap
Troubleall	Carl Heap
Bristle	Richard Harffey
Haggis	Robert Bathurst
Poacher	David Stranks
Nordern	Roger Michell
Puppy	Ivor Benjamin
Sharkwell	Tim Sullivan
Filcher	Julian Parkin
Stallholders	Bob Bryan, Julian Parkin, Michael Sweeney, Shamus Williams, Maryline Gangere, Pam Colbran, Sharon Leimann, Jane Heap, Tim Sullivan, Arthur Gleave, Catherine Beck
Director and designer	Griff Rhys Jones
Assistant director	Hank Williams
Costumes	Penny Thexton
Lighting	Mike Arnold
Music	Peter Fincham

February-March 1978: the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds

Director

Alan Ram

1978: Sydney University Drama Society, University of Sydney

John Littlewit	Dennis Watkins
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Michael Nothcott
Bartholomew Cokes	Ian John
Humphrey Wasp	Andrew Tighe
Dame Overdo	Vanessa Downing
Joan Trash	Jenny Rae
Director	Neil Armfield

15 June-29 July 1978 (on tour from 7 August): Young Vic Company, The Young Vic, London

John Littlewit	Michael Attwell
Win Littlewit	Penelope Nice
Dame Purecraft	Kate Versey
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Malcolm Rennie
Winwife	Frederick Warder
Quarlous	John Labanowski
Bartholomew Cokes	Philip Bowen
Humphrey Wasp	Tim Thomas
Adam Overdo	Bill Wallis
Dame Overdo	Tina Jones
Grace Wellborn	Fiona Victory
Lantern Leatherhead	James Carter
Joan Trash	Heather Baskerville
Ezekiel Edgworth	Stephen Boxer
Nightingale	Joss Buckley
Ursula	Laura Cox
Mooncalf	Chris Barnes
Jordan Knockem	Micky O’Donoughue
Captain Whit	Terry Mortimer
Troubleall	Bev Willis
Bristle	Christopher Ashley
Director	Michael Bogdanov
Assistant directors	Mel Smith, Jeremy James Taylor
Designer	Paul Bannister
Lighting	Michael Alvey
Puppets	Richard Dean, Stefan Baran

2 August-2 September 1978: Round House Trust at the Round House Theatre, London

John Littlewit	Jonathan Cecil
Win Littlewit	Victoria Plucknett
Dame Purecraft	Sheila Burrell
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Rowland Davies
Winwife	Maurice Colbourne
Quarlous	Donald Gee
Bartholomew Cokes	John Wells
Humphrey Wasp	Henry Woolf
Adam Overdo	Peter Bayliss
Dame Overdo	Iona Banks
Grace Wellborn	Jennie Stoller
Lantern Leatherhead	Antony Milner
Joan Trash	Patricia Ford
Ezekiel Edgworth	Steven Beard
Nightingale	David Foxxe
Ursula	Fanny Carby
Mooncalf	Peter Craze
Jordan Knockem	David Bailie
Captain Whit	Peter Craze
Punk Alice	Patricia Ford
Troubleall	David Claridge
Haggis	David Foxxe
Bristle, Sharkwell	Marcus Bell
Filcher	Patricia Ford
Director	Peter Barnes
Designer	Robin Don with Tanya McCallin
Music	John Riley
Costumes	Lindy Hemming
Animals	Michael Hirst
Puppets	David Claridge

May 1979: New Independent Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand

John Littlewit	Chris Bram
Solomon	Colin Aitken
Win Littlewit	Cathy Peters
Dame Purecraft	Jean Reid
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Paki Cherrington
Winwife	Murray Beasley
Quarlous	Gerald Davidson
Bartholomew Cokes	Mark Trezona
Humphrey Wasp	Jack Walley
Adam Overdo	Tim King
Dame Overdo	Pat Scott
Grace Wellborn	Lois Livingston
Lantern Leatherhead	Bruce de Grut
Joan Trash	Ngaire Bajko
Ezekiel Edgworth	Ian Mulligatawny
Nightingale	Nell Weatherly
Ursula	Margaret Logan
Mooncalf	Gavin O’Reilly
Jordan Knockem	Nick Shackleford
Captain Whit	Peter MacIntyre
Punk Alice	Linda Stirling
Troubleall	Richard Zimmerman
Bristle	Sandy Gauntlet
Haggis	Lloyd Gretton
Poacher	Colin Aitken
Costermonger	Heather Pitt
Sharkwell	Linda Stirling
	Colin Aitken
Children	Bridget and Stephen Laurence, Adrienne Livingston, Dale Cherrington
Director	John Curry
Designer	Robert Paterson
Costumes	Peggie Nicholson
Music	William Dart
Puppets	Brian Brennan

From 20 August 1979: Grange Drama Associates, Minack Theatre, Porthcurno

John Littlewit	Philip Wilcox
Win Littlewit	Isobel Arnett
Dame Purecraft	Fran Palmer
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Brian McEwan
Winwife	Tony Cork
Quarlous	Robert Sinfield
Bartholomew Cokes	David Roberts
Humphrey Wasp	Philip Chapman
Adam Overdo	Ken Richardson
Dame Overdo	Sue Feakin
Grace Wellborn	Nina Botting
Lantern Leatherhead	Glyn R. Dilley
Joan Trash	Jennifer Cook
Ezekiel Edgworth	Peter Howard
Nightingale	Dave Lynn
Ursula	Daisy May Mulcahy
Mooncalf	Christopher Birch
Jordan Knockem	Stephen Jennings
Captain Whit	Martin Fisher
Punk Alice	Yvette Glover
Troubleall	Christopher Birch
Bristle	Jennifer Cook
Haggis	Bernard Powell
Poacher	Judith Camplin
Puppy	Philip Holden
Filcher	Judith Camplin
Stage-keeper	Christopher Birth
Fair people, etc.	Tessa Bayliss, Judith Camplin, Richard Cant, Mary Gibson, Sophie, Anna and Corin Palmer, Bernard Powell, Martyn Webb and Tanya, Angus, and Emily McEwan.
Adapter and Director	Ron Palmer
Designer	Jenny Claydon

5-8 September 1979: Belgrade Youth Theatre, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry

John Littlewit	Clive Skelhon
Solomon	David Orczyk
Win Littlewit	Tania Ison
Dame Purecraft	Claire Hinson
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Jon Gaunt
Winwife	John Vernon
Quarlous	Laurence Boswell
Bartholomew Cokes	Greg Thomas
Humphrey Wasp	David Simms
Adam Overdo	Terry Nicholls
Dame Overdo	Kathy Joyce
Grace Wellborn	Lorraine McDonagh
Lantern Leatherhead	Dexter Hanoomansingh
Joan Trash	Jill Jones
Ezekiel Edgworth	Francis Bain Todd
Nightingale	Clive Owen
Ursula	Perry Costello
Mooncalf	Mark Tyrer
Jordan Knockem	Nigel Mulvey
Captain Whit	Paul Carl
Punk Alice	Corinne Gabel
Troubleall	Steven French
Bristle	Robert Hudson
Haggis	Jem Warr
Poacher	Steve Pettifer
Costermonger	John McGregor
Tinderbox man	Vincent Dunne
Corn-cutter	Tony Morris
Nordern	Adrian Parrott
Puppy	Melvyn Griffiths
Sharkwell	Mark Haywood
Filcher	Danny Boswell
Puppets	Paul Montes, Ian Parker
Customers, etc.	Chris Alcock, Julie Aspinall, Garry Clarke, Valerie Conner, Helen Corkery, Kam Dhaliwal, Susan Ennis, Kristine Faulconbridge, Wendy Gardner, Leslie Haywood, Jo Hogg, Susan Illingworth, Kevin Jones, Mandy Judge, Julie O’Grady, Emma Palmer, Narinder Pal Singh, Hayden Price, Sheila Rowe, Jannita and Shirley Smith, Susan Tranter, Andrew and Julie Wilson
Director	John Ginman
Assistant director	Michael Boyd
Designer	Elroy Ashmore
Costumes	Trudy Marklew
Lighting	Jeremy Hartill

18-29 August 1981: National Youth Theatre, Shaw Theatre, London

John Littlewit	Michael Robinson
Win Littlewit	Vibeke Brown
Dame Purecraft	Ingrid Brown
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Gareth Holloway
Winwife	Fraser Dunworth
Quarlous	Lawrence Good
Bartholomew Cokes	Tom Bermingham
Humphrey Wasp	Matthew Townshend
Adam Overdo	Philip Beckwith
Dame Overdo	Rebecca Blackman
Grace Wellborn	Lindsey Allwork
Lantern Leatherhead	Hugh Williams
Joan Trash	Patricia Miller
Ezekiel Edgworth	Nathan Ariss
Nightingale	Michael Cantwell
Ursula	Sally Dexter
Mooncalf	Sam Rumbelow
Jordan Knockem	David Izod
Val Cutting	Darren Clarke
Captain Whit	Joe Crilly
Punk Alice	Georgina McKee
Troubleall	Duncan Hayler
Bristle	Peter Warlow
Haggis	Adam Johnson
Poacher	Jonathan Broughton
Costermonger	Adam Annad
Nordern	Alistair Grant
Puppy	Hakeem Kazim
Filcher	Niall McGrogan
Sharkwell	Adam Annad
Urchins	Ivor Game, Nick Ragget, Neil Sykes
Passengers	Mark Breckon, Robert Bristow, Elliott Cooper, Simon Finch, Simon Gold, Dorcas Morgan, Rachel Preece, Vanessa Raison, Helen Stephenson, Peter Wakeman, Ray Wilson
Puppeteers	Jonathan Broughton, David Hall, Simon Tubb
Director	Graham Chinn
Assistant director	Esta Charkham
Designer	Bernard Culshaw
Lighting	Dave Horn
Music	Julian White
Fights	Henry Marshall

April 1982: Revels Players, Wesley Foundation, University of Illinois, Urbana

John Littlewit	John Salat
Win Littlewit	Karen Brems
Dame Purecraft	Charlotte Gibberman
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	David Van Matre
Winwife	Scott Wynns
Quarlous	Isaac Lieberman
Bartholomew Cokes	Erik Falllstrom
Humphrey Wasp	Garrick Paul Axelrod
Adam Overdo	Bruce Heck
Dame Overdo	Barbara Taylor
Grace Wellborn	Marla Zelener
Lantern Leatherhead	Thomas Malcolm Duncan
Joan Trash	Mary LaMantia
Ezekiel Edgworth	Notello LeNom
Nightingale	Lisa Cunningham
Ursula	Mark Chenail
Mooncalf	Mary Susan Lohse
Jordan Knockem	Larry De Boever
Troubleall	Michael Shapiro
Bristle	Bob Falato
Haggis	Kevin Davies
Poacher	Seth Palatnik
Costermonger	Pam Krachmalnick
Puppeteers	Elizabeth Goldsmith Conley, Alan Irgang
	Kevin Davies
Stage-keeper	Bob Falato
	Michael Shapiro
Crowd:	Maureen Chartier, Mitch Hanner, John Krenzer, Patricia McDermott, Ellen Mohr, Lisa Montgomery, Linda May Olsen, Elizabeth Pond
Director and designer	Rick Dinkel
Producer	Michael Shapiro
Assistant director	Mary Susan Lohse
Costumes	Mark Chenail
Puppets	Elizabeth Goldsmith Conley
Lighting	Bill Knapp

16-19 June 1982: Kent University Drama Board, Gulbenkian Theatre, Canterbury

John Littlewit	Richard Hollis
Win Littlewit	Christina Prado
Dame Purecraft	Esther Geller
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Fraser Haines
Winwife	Dominic Moore
Quarlous	Martin Hyder
Bartholomew Cokes	Chris French
Humphrey Wasp	Steve Keogh
Adam Overdo	Julian Fernandez
Dame Overdo	Melissa Bond
Grace Wellborn	Stephanie Weston
Lantern Leatherhead	Niall Shanahan
Joan Trash	Janet Walker
Ezekiel Edgworth	Mike Adams
Nightingale	Janet Herbert
Ursula	Yasmine Kartal
Mooncalf	Claire-Elaine Clarke
Jordan Knockem	Peter Nettell
Punk Alice	Vicky Berkson
Troubleall	Michael Pinfold
Bristle	Angus Chisholm
Haggis	Andy Littlejohn
Officer	Michael Bell
Costermonger	Gabrielle Bourne
Sharkwell	Caroline Coombes
Filcher	Gill Hanby
Puppeteers	Caroline Coombes, Vicky Burman, Gill Hanby, Janet Walker, Janet Herbert
Passengers	Susan Anderton, Caroline Coombes, Bridie Rodgers, Gill Hanby, Stine Olsen, Vicky Burman
Stage-keeper	Vicky Berkson
Scrivener	Michael Pinfold
Director	Christine Redington
Assistant directors	Mike Adams, Julian Fernandez, Christina Prado
Set design	Esther Geller, Kate Brockbank
Lighting	Chris Shaw

29 June-3 July 1982: the Summer Company, University Theatre, Manchester

John Littlewit	George Ugill
Win Littlewit	Katherine Jones
Dame Purecraft	Jeannie Lewis
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	David Phelan
Director	Laurence Boswell

4-9 July 1983: Richmond Shakespeare Society, Marble Hill Open Air Theatre, Richmond

John Littlewit	Martyn Andrews
Win Littlewit	Penny Waterman
Dame Purecraft	Jenny Hicks
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Brian Campbell
Winwife	Gerald Manning
Quarlous	Edward Jeoffroy
Bartholomew Cokes	Francis Abbott
Humphrey Wasp	David King
Adam Overdo	David Smidman
Dame Overdo	Jennifer Tudor
Grace Wellborn	Claudette Williamson
Lantern Leatherhead	Simon Bargate
Joan Trash	Anne Whittington
Ezekiel Edgworth	Ian Swankie
Nightingale	Michael Walters
Ursula	Joy Hobson
Mooncalf	Russell Norman
Val Cutting	Chris Pollard
Punk Alice	Vivian Leger
Troubleall	Barry L. Evans
Bristle	Kevin Childs
Poacher	Russell Norman
Puppeteers	James Addison, Mary Pitts, John Taylor
People of the Fair a fire-eater), Zena Kearley, Paul Kent, Vivian Leger, Jill Mönch, Philip Mulligan, Claire Novelli, Sasha Paul, Roland Peacock, Maureen Pompini, Nicholas Richards, Emma and Lorraine Ryall, Pam and Natalie Walters, Michael Williams	Shelley and Theresa Beard, Kevin Childs, Mark Colton, Sarah Howard, Annabel and Frances Jenkins, Lee Jenkins ( a fire-eater), Zena Kearley, Paul Kent, Vivian Leger, Jill Mönch, Philip Mulligan, Claire Novelli, Sasha Paul, Roland Peacock, Maureen Pompini, Nicholas Richards, Emma and Lorraine Ryall, Pam and Natalie Walters, Michael Williams
Director	Peter Richards
Designer	Pam Walters
Lighting	Nigel Morris, Ross Nimmo
Puppet show devised by	Alistair Fullerton
Puppets lent by	George Speaight

23-25 March 1984: Mountview Theatre School, London

Director John Dryden

21 August-9 September 1984: TN Theatre Company, Brookes Street Theatre, Brisbane, Australia

John Littlewit	Anthony Phelan
Win Littlewit	Vassy Cotsiopoulos
Dame Purecraft	Alexandra Black
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Rod Wissler
Winwife	Glenn Perry
Quarlous	Robert Arthur
Bartholomew Cokes	Richard Michael
Humphrey Wasp	Michael Whelan
Adam Overdo	Eugene Gilfedder
Dame Overdo	Victoria Arthur
Grace Wellborn	Justine Anderson
Lantern Leatherhead	Michael McCaffrey
Joan Trash	Alexandra Black
Ezekiel Edgworth	John Rush
Nightingale	Sean Mee
Ursula	Rosamund Vidgen
Mooncalf	Vassy Cotsiopoulos
Jordan Knockem	Jennifer Flowers
Val Cutting	John Rush
Captain Whit	Simon Burvill-Holmes
Punk Alice	Justine Anderson
Troubleall	Sean Mee
Stage-keeper	Michael McCaffrey
Book-holder	Jennifer Flowers
Director	Rod Wissler
Designer	Bill Haycock
Music	Eugene Gilfedder

30 October-8 November 1985: Rusden Theatre, Victoria College (Clayton, Melbourne, Australia)

Director/producer

Robert Holden

14-22 March 1986: Questors Theatre, Ealing, London

John Littlewit	Paul Clarke
Solomon	Andrew Davie
Win Littlewit	Alice Didsbury
Dame Purecraft	Sandra Healy
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Nevile Cruttenden
Winwife	Gavin McQueen
Quarlous	Alan Paterson
Bartholomew Cokes	Willo Johnston
Humphrey Wasp	Roger Lewis
Adam Overdo	Michael Green
Dame Overdo	Anne Sawbridge
Grace Wellborn	Jo Cope
Lantern Leatherhead	Richard Brown
Joan Trash	Grace Craddock
Ezekiel Edgworth	John Dobson
Nightingale	Meic Llewellyn
Ursula	Anne O’Brien
Mooncalf	Andrew Haynes
Jordan Knockem	John Kelly
Val Cutting	Terry Oakes
Captain Whit	Mike Robotham
Punk Alice	Sarah Andrews
Troubleall	Piers Whibley
Bristle	David Jenkins
Haggis	Geoff Webb
Poacher	Bernard Arigho
Costermonger	Jean Masters
Corn-cutter	Jeremy Bentham
Nordern	Peter MacNamara
Puppy	Paul Jiggins
Sharkwell	John Turpin
Filcher	Chris Morgan
Puppets	Steve Novy, Grace Craddock
Stage-keeper	Keith Parry
Book-holder	Roger de Toney
Scrivener	Tony Wallis
In addition, there were over thirty ‘passengers’ in invented walk-on roles
Director	John Davey
Assistant director	Carol Metcalfe
Designer	Ray Dunning
Lighting designer	Richard Broadhurst
Costume design	Jane Dewey
Composer	Michael Carver

4 April 1986: Ensemble Theatre Project, Canberra, Arts Centre, Australian National University

John Littlewit	Tim Mackay
Win Littlewit	Clare Allridge
Dame Purecraft	Joan Murray
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Hec McMillan
Winwife	Michelle Marzo
Quarlous	Phil Roberts
Bartholomew Cokes	James Wheeler
Humphrey Wasp	Boris Larazki
Adam Overdo	Denis Mackay
Dame Overdo	Camilla Blunden
Grace Wellborn	Ben Grieve
Lantern Leatherhead	Roland Manderson
Joan Trash	Anne Yuille
Ezekiel Edgworth	Joan Murray
Nightingale	Tim Mackay
Ursula	Stella Wilkie
Mooncalf	Ben Grieve
Jordan Knockem	Steve Payne
Captain Whit	Anne Yuille
Punk Alice	Michelle Marzo
Troubleall	Steve Payne
Costermonger	Clare Allridge
Lantern’s helper	Anne Yuille
Captain of the Watch	Camilla Blunden
Watchmen	Pamela Hollings, Boris Larazki, Roland Manderson, James Wheeler
Puppeteers	Debra Berzins, Kate Perkins
Stage-keeper	Roland Manderson
Book-holder	Boris Larazki
Director	Carol Woodrow
Assistant director	Tim Mackay
Set designer	Stephen Curtis
Costume designer	Amanda Lovejoy
Lighting designer	Ken McSwain
Puppets	Al Martinez, Debra Berzins

5-14 June 1986: Swan Theatre Company (Worcester), Swan Theatre and Racetrack, Worcester

John Littlewit	Peter Hollins
Win Littlewit	Sue Mullett
Dame Purecraft	Ann Moore
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Ken Horton
Winwife	Patrick Cannon
Quarlous	Dave Bonnick
Bartholomew Cokes	Richard Needham
Humphrey Wasp	John Kershaw
Adam Overdo	Edgar Criddle
Dame Overdo	Elizabeth Southgate
Grace Wellborn	Lisa Needham
Leatherhead	Giles Bartlett
Lantern	Justine Barker
Joan Trash	Rose Hawkes
Ezekiel Edgworth	James Barriscale
Nightingale	Derek Woooding
Ursula	Barbara Godfrey
Mooncalf	Sam Barriscale
Jordan Knockem	Judy Armitage
Val Cutting	Darryl Childs, Justin Bennett
Captain Whit	Vicki Howard
Punk Alice	Mary Ravenhall
Troubleall	Marc Dugmore
Bristle	Dave Tubb
Haggis	Andrew Dunkley
Costermonger	Norman Dunkley
Corn-cutter	Margaret Dunkley
Sharkwell	Keith Barrell
Filcher	Natalya Bennett
	Justine Barker
Puppets	Emma, Jane, and Megan Philpott, Joanne Lee
Stage-keeper	Isabella Bennett
Book-holder	Fiona Stevenson
Scrivener	Keith Barrell
Plus twenty passengers and stallholders, and Worcester Junior Festival Chorus
Direction and design	Luke Dixon, Paul Dart
Associate director	John Ginman
Director of puppet play	Jan Ryan

From 1 June 1987: New Shakespeare Company, Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, London

John Littlewit	Tom Mannion
Win Littlewit	Juliette Grassby
Dame Purecraft	Diana Fairfax
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Barry Stanton
Winwife	Peter Doran
Quarlous	Christopher Ettridge
Bartholomew Cokes	Christopher Biggins
Humphrey Wasp	David Neal
Adam Overdo	Peter Bayliss
Dame Overdo	Lynn Farleigh
Grace Wellborn	Noreen Leighton
Lantern Leatherhead	Richard Brain
Joan Trash	Georgie Glen
Ezekiel Edgworth	Joshua Le Touzel
Nightingale	Haydn Jenkins
Ursula	Peggy Mount
Mooncalf	Craig Stevenson
Jordan Knockem	Albie Woodington
Captain Whit	Paul Kirk
Punk Alice	Joanne Howarth
Troubleall	Christopher Ryan
Bristle	Andrew Alston
Haggis	Craig Stevenson
Costermonger, Corn-cutter	Gail Garside
Tinderbox seller	Joanne Howarth
Director	Peter Barnes
Designers	Patrick Robertson and Rosemary Vercoe
Puppets	Graeme Galvin
Lighting	Ian Callander
Music	Stephen Deutsch
Movement	Ben Benison
Fights	John Waller

31 March-9 April, 1988: Studio Theatre Fonds, University of Alberta, Canada

Director

Carl Hare

From 20 October 1988: Royal National Theatre Company, Olivier Theatre, London

John Littlewit	David Bamber
Win Littlewit	Kate Spiro
Dame Purecraft	Barbara Leigh-Hunt
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	David Burke
Winwife	Patrick Drury
Quarlous	Stephen Moore
Bartholomew Cokes	Guy Henry
Humphrey Wasp	Anthony O’Donnell
Adam Overdo	John Wells
Dame Overdo	Geraldine Fitzgerald
Grace Wellborn	Katharine Schlesinger
Lantern Leatherhead	Peter-Hugo Daly
Joan Trash	Maggie McCarthy
Ezekiel Edgworth	Jonathan Cullen
Nightingale	Jim Barclay
Ursula	Mark Addy
Mooncalf	Paul J. Medford
Jordan Knockem	Mark Long
Captain Whit	Fintan McKeown
Punk Alice	Marian McLoughlin
Troubleall	Michael Bryant
Bristle	Ged McKenna
Haggis	Tam Dean Burn
Watchmen	Glyne Pritchard, Harry Waters
Corn-cutter	Dean Hollingsworth
Costermonger	Harry Waters
Mousetrap man	Glyn Pritchard
Nordern	Nicholas Blane
Puppy	Dan Hildebrand
Sharkwell	Douglas McFerran
Filcher	Mark Lockyer
Puppeteers	Ged McKenna, Douglas McFerran, Mark Lockyer
	Judith Coke
Stage-keeper	Peter-Hugo Daly
Book-holder	Mark Long
Scrivener	Jim Barclay
Customers:	Tam Dean Burn, Judith Coke, Jennifer Hill, Dean Hollingsworth, Ged McKenna, Alan White
Children:	Stuart Ayre, Carrie Baker, Diane and Jacob Edwards, Lisa Hall, Gary and Gemma Patricia Jones, Rachel Lane, Richard Lawrence, Nicola Vann
Director	Richard Eyre
Designer	William Dudley
Lighting	David Hersey
Music	Ilona Sekacz
Puppet master	Geoff Felix
Fights	Johnny Hutch
Dance	Gillian Gregory

23-25 March 1989: Contact Youth Theatre, University Theatre, Devas Street, Manchester

Designer	Kendra Ullyart
Costumes	Kevin Pollard

23 November-1 December 1990: Norwich Players, Maddermarket Theatre, Norwich

Norwich Players appeared anonymously.

Director	Henry Burke
Setting	John West

16-27 June, 1992: Old Vic Theatre School, Bristol New Vic

John Littlewit	Dave Fishley
Solomon	Graham Breeze
Win Littlewit	Nicole Arumugam
Dame Purecraft	Nicola Jeffries
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	John Lewes
Winwife	Peter Crouch
Quarlous	Max Digby
Bartholomew Cokes	Alexander Nash
Humphrey Wasp	Nicholas Corney
Adam Overdo	Nick Lucas
Dame Overdo	Claire Laurie
Grace Wellborn	Caroline Ashley
Lantern Leatherhead	Richard James
Joan Trash	Sarah Edmunds
Ezekiel Edgworth	Gavin Abbott
Nightingale	Nigel Parkes-Davies
Ursula	Nicola Smyth
Mooncalf	Oliver Senton
Jordan Knockem	Sean O’Neill
Val Cutting	Pal Aron
Captain Whit	Robert Laughlin
Punk Alice	Ingrid Wiseman
Troubleall	Brian McGovern
Bristle	James Mair
Haggis	James Barriscale
Poacher	Robert F. Ryann
Watchmen	Andrew Fraser, Rupert Penry-Jones
Costermonger	Ingrid Wiseman
Nordern	Ian Sanders
Puppy	John Coleman
Porters	Philip Gates, Giles Tomlin
Assistant Stage Manager (Induction)	James Mair
Director	Richard Howard
Assistant directors	Giles Burton, Ninow Jerome
Designer	Helen Green
Costumes	Samantha Pine
Puppet master	Karen Bailey

2-8 September 1993: Manchester Youth Theatre, Library Theatre, Manchester

Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Robert Wolstenholme
Quarlous	Greg Haiste
Bartholomew Cokes	Gareth Lewis
Adam Overdo	Simon Nock
Ursula	Lisa May
Jordan Knockem	James McClaren
Troubleall	Nick Malinowski
Director	Neil Davies

1994: Thé tre du Rideau Vert, Quebec, Canada, adaptation by Antonine Maillet as La foire de St-Bartholomé

12 May 1996: Globe Theatre Reading

John Littlewit	John McAndrew
Win Littlewit	Rebecca Saire
Dame Purecraft	Susan Engel
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Bruce Alexander
Winwife	Jonathan Cake
Quarlous	John Hodgkinson
Bartholomew Cokes	Julian Rhynd-Tutt
Humphrey Wasp	Wayne Cater
Adam Overdo	Peter Bayliss
Dame Overdo	Joanne Howarth
Grace Wellborn	Lara Bobroff
Lantern Leatherhead	John Challis
Joan Trash	Joanne Howarth
Ezekiel Edgworth	William Osborne
Nightingale	Liam McKenna
Ursula	Nick Holder
Jordan Knockem	Isaac Maxwell-Hunt
Captain Whit	Lloyd Hutchinson
Troubleall	Sylvester Morand
Haggis	Cameron Jack
Sharkwell	Jack Davenport
Filcher	David Chapman
Coordinator	Alan Cox

25 October-10 November 1996: Berliner Grund Theater, an adaptation

Director

Tony Kingston

From 4 December, 1997: Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (and the Young Vic, London, from February, 1999)

John Littlewit	Stephen Boxer
Win Littlewit	Poppy Miller
Dame Purecraft	Susan Tracy
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	David Henry
Winwife	Zubin Varla
Quarlous	Rob Edwards
Bartholomew Cokes	Tom Goodman-Hill
Humphrey Wasp	Gavin Muir
Adam Overdo	John Quayle
Dame Overdo	Caroline Harris
Grace Wellborn	Katy Odey
Lantern Leatherhead	Mark Hadfield
Joan Trash	Maureen Purkis
Ezekiel Edgworth	Owen Sharpe
Nightingale	Jon Clairmonte
Ursula	Carol Macready
Mooncalf	James Tucker
Jordan Knockem	Steve Swinscoe
Captain Whit	John Straiton
Punk Alice	Tina Gambe
Troubleall	Kevork Malikyan
Bristle	Jake Nightingale
Haggis	Archie Lal
Poacher	John Straiton
Nordern	David Henry
Puppy	Jon Clairmonte
Sharkwell	Paul Popplewell
Filcher	James Tucker
Director	Laurence Boswell
Designer	Tom Piper
Lighting	Adam Silverman
Music	Simon Bass
Movement	Toby Sedgwick
Fights	Terry King
Puppetry consultant	Sue Buckmaster

8-12 May 2001: Theatre De Lijsterbes, Kraainem, Belgium

16-21 July 2001: Chesil Theatre, Winchester

John Littlewit	Jon Mackintosh
Win Littlewit	Lucy Hill
Dame Purecraft	Gerry Tuff
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Tom Williams
Winwife	Robin Freeman
Quarlous	Derek Scott
Bartholomew Cokes	Martin Humphrey
Humphrey Wasp	Brian Fullaway
Adam Overdo	Mike Heseldin
Dame Overdo	Barbara Teitz
Grace Wellborn	Sarah Thorp
Lantern Leatherhead	Michael Slinn
Joan Trash	Lisa Nielsen
Ezekiel Edgworth	Paul McCaffrey
Nightingale	Geoff Ridden
Ursula	Ruth Page
Mooncalf	David Michel
Jordan Knockem	David Hazlehurst
Troubleall	Tim Rouledge
Bristle	Richard Fullaway
Haggis	Martin Watters
Director and adaptor	Graham Cranmer
Costumes	Deborah Cranmer
Props	Jo Burnaby
Puppets	Sue Fish

23 June 2005: Marlowe Society, Cambridge University, at the Maria Bjornson Theatre, Robinson College, Cambridge

John Littlewit	Charles Arrowsmith
Win Littlewit	Sarah Brocklehurst
Dame Purecraft	Holly Strickland
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Sam Kitchener
Winwife	Lewis Westbury
Quarlous	Benjamin Deery
Bartholomew Cokes	Tom Hensby
Humphrey Wasp	Adam Welch
Adam Overdo	Arthur House
Dame Overdo	Helen Longfils
Grace Wellborn	Alexa Lamont
Lantern Leatherhead	Luke Roberts
Joan Trash	Charlotte Watson
Ezekiel Edgworth	Joanna Benecke
Nightingale	Anna Prowse
Ursula	Esme Harwood
Mooncalf	Tom Hennessey
Jordan Knockem	Joe Swarbrick
Val Cutting	Amanda Akass
Captain Whit	Mark Ferguson
Punk Alice	Nikki Clements
Troubleall	Sam Yates
Bristle	Sara Sheridan
Poacher, Sharkwell	Richard Pygott
Costermonger	Jenny Commin
Nordern	Rosie Senguel
Puppy	Fred Crawley
Director/designer	Alex Outhwaite, Joe Swarbrick
Producer	Bella Watts
Lighting	Gemma Holliday
Composer	Anna Prowse
Puppet makers	Jen Reid, Hatty Morris, Nikky Arding

In repertory, June-October 2009: Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Ontario, at the Tom Patterson Theatre

John Littlewit	Matt Steinberg
Solomon Peter	James Haworth
Win Littlewit	Jennifer Paterson
Dame Purecraft	Brigit Wilson
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Juan Chioran
Winwife	Christopher Prentice
Quarlous	Jonathan Goad
Bartholomew Cokes	Trent Pardy
Humphrey Wasp	Brian Tree
Adam Overdo	Tom McCamus
Dame Overdo	Dalal Badr
Grace Wellborn	Alana Hawley
Lantern Leatherhead	Cliff Saunders
Joan Trash	Kelli Fox
Ezekiel Edgworth	Jesse Aaron Dwyer
Nightingale	Quincy Armorer
Ursula	Lucy Peacock
Mooncalf	Abigail Winter-Culliford
Jordan Knockem	Randy Hughson
Val Cutting	Jon de Leon
Captain Whit	Victor Ertmanis
Punk Alice Suzanne	Roberts Smith
Troubleall	Ian Lake
Bristle	Michael Spencer-Davis
Haggis	Skye Brandon
Poacher	Sean Baek
Costermonger	Robert King
Tinderbox man	Colin Heath
Corn-cutter	Jon de Leon
Nordern	Colin Heath
Puppy	Robert King
Sharkwell	Jon de Leon
Filcher	Noah Reid
Musician	Kevin Ramessar
Acrobats	Colin Heath, Suzanne Roberts Smith
Stilt walker	Ian Lake
Bearded lady	Laura Condlin
Rich lady	Claire Lautier
Her son	Dawson Lott
Urchin	Christopher Van Hagen
Puppet assistant	Skye Brandon
Director	Antoni Cimolino
Assistant director, choreographer	Keira Loughran
Designer	Carolyn M. Smith
Assistant designer	Joanna Yu
Lighting designer	Steven Hawkins
Composer	Steven Page
Sound designer	Peter McBoyle
Fight director	Todd Campbell

August, 2010: Castaway Community Theatre, Aberystwyth, at Aberystwyth Arts Centre

John Littlewit	Jim Finnis
Win Littlewit	Catrin Fflûr Huws
Dame Purecraft	Norma Izon
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	John Daniel Edwards
Winwife	Darren O’Connell
Quarlous	Pete Hughes
Bartholomew Cokes	Alex Gilbey
Humphrey Wasp	Keith Huckfield
Adam Overdo	Paul Ditch
Dame Overdo	June Smith
Grace Wellborn	Liz Real
Lantern Leatherhead	Michelle Jackson
Joan Trash	Colette Williams
Ezekiel Edgworth	Alem Misan Ali-Yousif Hassan al-Khamiri
Nightingale	Ryan Woodruff
Ursula	Lindsay Blumfield
Mooncalf	Jack Gilbert
Jordan Knockem	Drew Lewis
Captain Whit	Luke Tull
Troubleall	Caroline Clark
Davy Bristle	Nick Martin
Toby Bristle	Ryan Woodruff
Voices of the Puppets	Wes Brom
Director and sound design	David Blumfield
Assistant director	Julie McNicholls
Set and lighting	design Duncan Gough
Puppetmakers	Michelle Jackson, Liz Real

March-April, 2011: Willing Suspension Productions, Boston University Student Theater, Agganis Arena

John Littlewit	Jonathan Deschere
Win Littlewit	Emily Brownell
Dame Purecraft	Mary Parker
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Lucas Griswold
Winwife	Samuel Dudley
Quarlous	Vincent Lai
Bartholomew Cokes	Benjamin DeTora
Humphrey Wasp	Charlotte Saul
Adam Overdo	Allistair Johnson
Dame Overdo	Marta Armengol Royo
Grace Wellborn	Melody Tran
Lantern Leatherhead	Fabiana Cabral
Joan Trash	Kelsey Simonson
Ezekiel Edgworth	Krystina Mainor
Nightingale	Katherine Hendley
Ursula	Emily Gruber
Mooncalf	Caitlin O'Halleran
Jordan Knockem	Dana Sigmund
Punk Alice and Haggis	Amanda Groszek
Troubleall	Christopher Fisher
Bristle and Costermonger	Melissa Papalcure
Poacher	Julia Acheson
Directors	Kristin Bezio, Liam Meyer, Matthew Stokes
Producer	Holly Schaaf
Set design	Emily Gruber
Lighting design	Kristin Bezio

July 2011: Vile Passéist Theatre, Bus Stop Theatre, Halifax, Nova Scotia

John Littlewit	Chris O’Neill
Win Littlewit	Rebecca Currie-Morrison
Dame Purecraft	Claire St-Francois
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Dan Bray
Winwife	Shawn Maggio
Quarlous	Pasha Ebrahimi
Bartholomew Cokes	Eric Fitzpatrick
Humphrey Wasp	Jesse Robb
Adam Overdo	Keith Morrison
Dame Overdo	Christine Daniels
Grace Wellborn	Chloe Hung
Lantern Leatherhead	Mike Chandler
Joan Trash	Colleen MacIsaac
Ezekiel Edgworth	Chloe Sullivan
Nightingale	Emma Laishram
Ursula	Ona Archibald
Mooncalf	Missy Ryan
Jordan Knockem	Matthew Peach
Captain Whit	Edward Finigan
Punk Alice	Heather Beresford
Troubleall	Padraigh MacDonald
Bristle and Tinderbox man	Jeffrey Hale
Officer	Edward Finigan
Haggis and Costermonger	Donovan Purcell
Corn-cutter and Filcher	Heather Beresford
Stage-keeper	Clare Waqué
Book-holder	Alison House
Scrivener	Padraigh MacDonald
Director, producer	Dan Bray
Assistant director	Megan Kendell
Original music	Mike Chandler
Additional music	Michael Robson
Costume designer	Matthew Peach
Lighting designer	Clare Waqué
Set design	Taylor Andrews
Puppets	Kelley Bray

9-13 October 2012: Marlowe Society, Cambridge, at the ADC Theatre, Cambridge

John Littlewit	Jack Gamble
Win Littlewit	Jennie King
Dame Purecraft	Emma Fairhurst
Zeal-of-the-land Busy	Edward Eustace
Winwife	Theo Boyce
Quarlous	Julian Mack
Bartholomew Cokes	Quentin Beroud
Humphrey Wasp	Charlie Merriman
Adam Overdo	Freddy Sawyer
Dame Overdo	Juliet Griffin
Grace Wellborn	Rozzi Nicholson-Lailey
Lantern Leatherhead	James Bloor
Joan Trash	Lorna Reader
Ezekiel Edgworth	Hugh Stubbins
Nightingale	Temi Wilkey
Ursula	Anna Isaac
Mooncalf	Maria Pawlikowska
Jordan Knockem	Stephen Bermingham
Val Cutting	Dom Biddle
Captain Whit	Archie Preston
Punk Alice Juliet	Cameron-Wilson
Troubleall	Fred Maynard
Watchmen	Lewis Macdonald, Jack Oxley, Lizzie Schenk
Director	Harry Michell
Assistant director	Rosie Brown
Producer	Isaac Henrion
Assistant producer	Emma Wilkinson
Executive producer	Phil Shipley
Musical director	Johann Kamper
Set designer	Jess Lane
Lighting designer	Ian Baker
Costume designer	Susie Hill

APPENDIX 4

LIST OF NEWSPAPER REVIEWS CITED

The Times, 28 June 1921

The Telegraph, 28 June 1921

‘Tarn’, The Spectator, 2 July 1921

D. McCarthy, The New Statesman, 2 July 1921

H. G., The Observer, 3 July 1921

H. H., The Cambridge Daily News, 12 March 1947

The Cambridge Review, 19 April 1947

A. G. H., Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, 22 August 1950

I. Wardle, The Times, 24 August 1950

The Evening Standard, 25 August 1950

Tribune, 1 September 1950

J. Barber, The Daily Express, 19 December 1950

J. C. Trewin, The Observer, 24 December 1950

Richard Findlater, Tribune, 29 December 1950

J. C. Trewin, John o’London’s Weekly, 5 January 1951

Times Educational Supplement, 12 January

The Tablet, 13 January 1951

The Times, 16 July 1953

The Times, 24 November 1955

T. H., The Cambridge Daily News, 26 November 1955

G. L. Evans, The Manchester Guardian, 29 July 1959

F. Dibb, Plays and Players, September 1959

J. Gibb, The Dartmouth, 11 May 1966

B. J., Manchester Evening News, 19 May 1965

B. J., The Bath and Wilts Evening Chronicle, 31 August 1966

J. Coe, The Bristol Evening Post, 31 August 1966

F. H. L., Bath Weekly Chronicle, 3 September 1966

R. Bryden, The Observer, 4 September 1966

G. Dowland, Semper Floreat, 15 September 1966, 17

A. Shearer, The Guardian, 31 August 1966

P. Lewis, Daily Mail, 31 August 1966

A. Thirkell, The Daily Mirror, 31 October 1969

P. Hope-Wallace, The Guardian, 31 October 1969

F. Marcus, The Sunday Telegraph, 2 November 1969

R. Bryden, The Observer, 2 November 1969

D. A. N. Jones, The Listener, 6 November 1969

R. B. M., Stage and Television Today, 6 November 1969

S. Bannock, The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 7 November 1969

J. C. Trewin, The Birmingham Post, 8 November 1969

H. Spurling, The Spectator, 8 November 1969

R. Strong, Queen, 26 November 1969

M. Anderson, Plays and Players, January 1970

J. Mapplebeck, Sunday Times, 28 November 1970

M. Grey, Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 1 December 1970

Sutton News, 10 November 1972

J. G. Reever, Cherwell, 28 May 1975

R. Thornber, Guardian, 12 June 1976

I. Wardle, The Times, 12 June 1976

N. Chaillet, Plays and Players, September, 1976

B. A. Young, The Financial Times, 10 March 1977

H. Neill, Times Educational Supplement, 23 June 1978

N. Chaillet, The Times, 23 June 1978

M. Billington, The Guardian, 23 June 1978

M. Coveney, The Financial Times, 23 June, 4 August 1978

J. Barber, Daily Telegraph, 24 June 1978

Punch, 5 July 1978

G. Reynolds, Plays and Players, August 1978

I. Wardle, The Times, 4 August 1978

M. Billington, The Guardian, 4 August 1978

M. Coveney, Financial Times, 4 August 1978

J. Ellison, Evening Standard, 4 August 1978

G. Reynolds, Plays and Players, October 1978

F. Ruhrmund, The Cornishman, 23 August 1979

P. McGarry, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 6 September 1979

N. de Jongh, The Guardian, 20 August 1981

N. Chaillet, The Times, 20 August 1981

M. D. H., The Daily Telegraph, 20 August 1981

R. Say, The Sunday Telegraph, 23 August 1981

The Kentish Gazette, 25 June 1982

R. Harris, The Richmond and Twickenham Times, 8 July 1983

N. Vittachi, The Ealing Gazette, 14 March 1986

D. Ford, The Worcester Evening News, 6 June 1986

J. Kingston, The Times, 2 June 1987

J. Walsh, London Evening Standard, 3 June 1987

N. de Jongh, The Guardian, 3 June 1987

J. C. Trewin, Birmingham Post, 3 June 1987

J. Tinker, The Daily Mail, 5 June 1987

N. St George, BBC Radio London, 6 June 1987

K. Hurren, The Mail on Sunday, 7 June 1987

International Herald Tribune, 10 June 1987

J. Hiley, The Listener, 11 June 1987

Punch, 11 June 1987

J. Connor, City Limits, 11 June 1987

S. Trussler, Plays and Players, August 1987

J. Peter, The Sunday Times, 15 October 1988

I. Wardle, The Times, 22 October 1988

M. Coveney, The Financial Times, 22 October 1988

A. Donaldson, The Glasgow Herald, 26 October 1988

P. Taylor, The Independent, 22 October 1988

M. Billington, The Guardian, 22 October 1988

M. Ratcliffe, The Observer, 23 October 1988

J. Tinker, The Daily Mail, 27 October 1988

C. Edwards, The Spectator, 29 October 1988

S. Morley, Punch, 4 November 1988

P. Porter, TLS, 4 November 1988

D. Nathan, The Jewish Chronicle, 4 November 1988

J. Elsom, BBC Radio 3 Critics’ Forum, 12 November 1988

R. Cave, Times Higher Education Supplement, 9 December 1988

A. Renton, The Illustrated London News, December 1988

M. Esslin, Plays International, December-January 1988-89

A. Hulme, Manchester Evening News, 23 March 1989

Norwich Mercury and Advertiser, 23 and 30 November 1990

V. Thomas, The Stratford-upon-Avon Herald, 12 December 1997

M. Billington, 13 December 1997

S. Clapp, The Observer, 14 December 1997

C. Spencer, The Daily Telegraph, 15 December 1997

K. Duncan-Jones, TLS, 26 December 1997

G. Walker, CahiersÉ, 54, 1998, 121

S. Hemming, The Financial Times, 2 March 1999

The Hampshire Chronicle, 20 July 2001